The_Bugbear_Of_Literacy

Books by the same author still in print :

THE TRANSFORMATION OF NATURE IN ART, 2nd ed.,
Cambridge, 1934.

THE MIRROR OF GESTURE (with G. K. Duggirala),

2nd ed., New York, 1935.
ELEMENTS OF BUDDHIST ICONOGRAPHY, Cambridge,

1935-
SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY AND TEMPORAL POWER IN THE

INDIAN THEORY OF GOVERNMENT, New Haven,

1942.
RECOLLECTION, INDIAN AND PLATONIC, AND ON THE

ONE AND ONLY TRANSMIGRANT, New Haven, 1944.
RELIGIOUS BASIS OF THE FORMS OF INDIAN SOCIETY,

NEW YORK, 1946.
FIGURES OF SPEECH OR FIGURES OF THOUGHT ?

London, 1946.
See also Bibliographies in Ars Islamica IX, 1942, and

Psychiatry VIII, 1945.

The Bugbear
of Literacy

By

ANANDA K. COOMARAS WAMY

With an Introduction by Robert Allerton Parker

London

DENNIS DOBSON LTD.

Copyright, 1943, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1947, by The John Day
Company under the title of " Am I My Brother's Keeper?"
Quotations of five hundred words or less from this book
may be made without written permission. Published in the
Dominion of Canada by Longmans, Green <& Company,
Toronto.

First published in Great Britain in MCMXLIX by DENNIS
DOBSON LIMITED, 12 Park Place, St. James% London,
S.W.I. All rights reserved. Printed in Great Britain by
THE BURLEIGH PRESS, Lewins Mead, Bristol 1.
142 IR

CONTENTS

Introduction by Robert Atterton Parker vii

I

Am I My Brother's Keeper ? I

II
The Bugbear of Literacy 23

III
Paths That Lead to the Same Summit 42

IV
Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge 64

V
East and West 78

VI
"Spiritual Paternity" and the "Puppet Complex" 92

VII
Gradation, Evolution, and Reincarnation 122

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The essays in this volume have been slightly revised, and
notes have been added. " Am I My Brother's Keeper ? "
appeared first in Asia and the Americas, March, 1943;
" The Bugbear of Literacy " in Asia and the Americas ,
February, 1944 ; " Paths That Lead to the Same Sum-
mit " in Motive, May, 1944 ; " Eastern Wisdom and
Western Knowledge " in Isis XXIV, Part 4, 1943 ; " East
and West " in Biosophical Review, VIII, 1945, and in The
Religious Basis of the Forms of Indian Society, New York,
1946 ; " ' Spiritual Paternity ' and the ' Puppet Complex* "
in Psychiatry, August, 1945 ; and " Gradation, Evolution,
and Reincarnation " in Main Currents in Modern Thought,
Summer, 1946. The author's thanks are due to the editors
of these publications and to Mrs. Eric Gill for permission
to use the woodcut " Progress."

INTRODUCTION

TO certain readers, Coomaraswamy's ideas may
seem highly controversial and destructive of commonly
accepted assumptions. Such antagonists may object
that this indictment of modern Western civilization
is based upon obstinate age-old Oriental prejudices.
But Ananda Coomaraswamy is not merely " an
eminent Orientalist " (as Aldous Huxley characterizes
him in The Perennial Philosophy) ; nor is he merely an
authority on Oriental art. The ideas he formulates
in these essays and reviews are expressed with the
authority of a lifetime of scholarship. He writes, as
he has elsewhere explained, " from a strictly orthodox
point of view . . . endeavouring to speak with mathe-
matical precision, but never employing words of our
own, or making any affirmations for which authority
could not be cited by chapter and verse ; in this way
making even our technique characteristically Indian."
Since Dr. Coomaraswamy deprecated personality
and personalism, and condemned the contemporary
mania for exhibitionary self-exploitation, he was the
most reticent of men in furnishing biographical details.
Yet, for lay readers, such details, and an outline of his
crowded career, seem necessary for an understanding
of the broad foundations of his thought. It may
come as a surprise, for instance, to know that his
mother was English ; that he began his career as a
geologist a petrologist ; that he held a degree as a
Doctor of Science from the University of London ;
and that though he was without doubt the most

vii

The Bugbear of Literacy

distinguished exponent of the Philosophic* Perennis
in the English-speaking world, he was by no means the
advocate of the vague, synthetic " theosophy " vul-
garized in our Western world, nor of that theory of
" reincarnation " meaning the return of deceased
individuals to rebirth on this earth which is popularly
and erroneously associated in certain circles with
Hindu "philosophy." In the hope of clearing the
air of such prejudices and misconceptions, I have
collected the following biographical details :

Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy was born on
August 22, 1877, in Colombo, Ceylon, the son of a
distinguished Cingalese gentleman, Sir Mutu Coomara-
swamy, the first Hindu to have been called to the bar
in London, and author of the first translation into
English of a Pali Buddhist text. Sir Mutu died
before his son was two years old, and the child was
brought up in England by his British mother (who
survived until 1942).

Ananda Coomaraswamy did not return to his native
land until nearly a quarter of a century later. He
was educated first at Wycliffe College, at Stonehouse in
Gloucestershire, and later at the University of London.
Although, without doubt, the Cingalese youth felt the
all-pervading influences of John Ruskin and William
Morris in the awakening nineties, his deeper interests
were focused upon science in particular upon geology
and mineralogy. At twenty-two he contributed a
paper on " Ceylon Rocks and Graphite " to the
Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society ; and at
twenty-five he was appointed director of the Mineral-
ogical Survey of Ceylon. A few yearp later his work on
the geology of Ceylon won him the degree of Doctor of
Science from the University of London.

viii

Introduction

Life in Ceylon opened his eyes to the withering
blight cast upon her native arts and crafts by the
invasion of Occidental industrialism. Courageously
and unequivocally the young Coomaraswamy became
the champion of those " native " cultures and handi-
crafts which were threatened with extermination by
the " proselytizing fury " of Occidental civilization.

From 1917 until 1947 (the year of his death) Coo-
maraswamy was with the Boston Museum of Fine
Arts, as a research fellow in Oriental art, building up
its unsurpassed department of Indian art ; collecting,
interpreting, expounding to museum curators the
traditional philosophy of life and the function of art in
human society ; demonstrating that all significant
expressions, whether in the crafts or in games and other
" play," are varying dialects and symbolic activities
of one language of the spirit.

Coomaraswamy has been labelled as an expert in
Oriental art : but his " Orientalism " had nothing
in common with the pseudo-occultism and syncretic
theosophistry that are volatilized by the self-appointed
prophets of the "cults." He liked to puncture the
stereotyped fallacy of the " mysterious " and " mysti-
fying " East, and asserted that a faithful account of
Hinduism might be attained by a categorical denial of
most of the statements (e.g. about " reincarnation ")
that have been made about it not only by European
scholars, but even by Indians trained in the contem-
porary sceptical and evolutionary habits of thinking.

His pen was an instrument of precision. His
closely and tightly woven fabric of thought was the
very model of explicit denotation a virtue of written
expression that is nowadays being rediscovered. For
this scholar the exegesis of ancient texts was above all

ix

The Bugbear of Literacy

else a scientific pursuit, considered as means to a more
abundant life. He prided himself upon never intro-
ducing phrases of his own and never made any claims
for which he could not cite chapter and verse. His
compact, condensed prose often presented a forbidding
mosaic on the printed page, offering nothing in the way
of enticement to slothful contemporary eyes, but
challenging attention none the less because of its rigorous
exactitude, like that of a mathematical demonstration.
Not infrequently matter that would suffice for a whole
article was compressed into a footnote. But even
when he was thus writing for scholars, it was certainly
not only for scholars ; and when expressly for those
who are not scholars, he could, as the essays in the
present collection show, write very simply, relegating
footnotes to concluding pages where the reader can
ignore them if he so desires.

In the unfolding of this " myriad-minded " intellect
from geology to archaeology and thence to all the
arts and expressions, from the humblest to the highest
aspirations of all mankind one is tempted to find a
parallel to Leonardo's universal interests.

Beginning, as .we have seen, with geology and
mineralogy, Coomaraswamy's researches became uni-
versal and all-embracing, ranging from philology in a
dozen languages to music and iconography, and from
the most ancient metaphysics to the most contemporary
problems in politics, sociology, and anthropology.
As an admirer has recently stated: "Never has he
had time for, nor interest in, presenting personal ideas
or novel theories, so constantly and so tirelessly has
he devoted his energies to the rediscovery of the
truth and the relating of the principles by which
cultures rise and fall." Nor did he ever compromise

x

Introduction

or pull his punches in stating these truths as he has
discovered them.

This courage was especially manifest in Coomara-
swamy's essays devoted to art. He was our most
eloquent defender of the traditional philosophy of art
the doctrine exemplified in the artifacts that have
come down to us from the Middle Ages and the Orient.
This philosophy Coomaraswamy interpreted many
times and with a wealth of explicit reference ; and in
contrast he pointed out the pathological aspects of
our contemporary aesthetes who collect the exotic
and the primitive with the greediness of the magpie
snatching up bits of coloured ribbon with which to
" decorate " its nest ! The arts of the great time-
less tradition move ever from within outward, and are
never concerned merely with the idealization of
objective fact. Modern art, on the other hand, has no
resource or end beyond itself ; it is too " fine " to be
applied, and too " significant " to mean anything
precisely.

For Coomaraswamy, as spokesman of tradition,
" disinterested aesthetic contemplation " was a con-
tradiction in terms, and nonsense. The purpose of
art has always been, and still should be, effective
communication. But what, ask the critics, can works
of art communicate ? " Let us tell the painful
truth," Coomaraswamy retorts, " that most of these
works are about God, whom nowadays we never men-
tion in polite society ! " One is reminded of the fact
that our modern treatises on ukiyoye rarely mention,
the hetaerae upon whose lives the great part of this
art centres. Youthful anthropologists, like Deacon
or Tom Harrisson, retracing the continuous-line sand
drawings on a lonely beach of the New Hebrides,

xi

The Bugbear of Literacy

reenacting the dromenon of the last survivors of a for-
gotten culture, in this process of feeling-with, may come
closer toward understanding alien races, to the heart
of true art, than does the most ecstatic and hysterical
of Picassolaters in a Fifty-seventh Street gallery.
For, to understand and to appreciate the art of any
people, one must become united with it in spirit ;
one must have learned to feel and to understand the
cosmos as they have felt and understood it never
approaching them with condescension or contempt,
or even with the sort of " objectivity " that, while it
may succeed in depicting, always fails to interpret their
works and days.

This is not the place to enlarge upon these arresting
and challenging ideas. If we are " off the beam "
to-day in our " appreciation of art," as Coomaraswamy
diagnosed our current ailment, it may be, as he asserted,
because we are living through " one of the two most
conspicuous ages of human decadence " that first
being the late classical. Narcissistic exhibitionism
and magpie aestheticism with its greedy acquisition
of the irrelevant are but twin symptoms of our
cultural schizophrenia. The manufacture of " art "
in studios, coupled with the artless facture of the
things that are made in factories, represented for him
a reduction of the standard of living to subhuman
levels. The coincidence of beauty and utility,
significance and aptitude, must determine all human
values. Artifacts serving such values are possible
only in a co-operative society of free and responsible
craftsmen a vocational society in which men are free
to be concerned with the good of the work to be done,
and individually responsible for its quality. Coomara-
swamy's ideas on art may be studied in Why Exhibit

xii

Introduction

Works of Art ? and Figures of Speech or Figures of
Thought? (London : Luzac & Co., 1943, 1946.)

Now this traditional philosophy of art is integrated
with the whole traditional philosophy of human society,
or in other words, and as the readers of the following
essays will learn, with the concept of a kingdom of
God on earth. Coomaraswamy's work is a monumental
achievement in integration : he has become the fore-
most exponent of the Philosophia Perennis, of St.
Augustine's " wisdom uncreate, the same now that it
ever was, and the same to be forevermore." Across
far continents and over centuries and millennia of re-
corded and unrecorded time, this doctrine speaks in
varying dialects, but with a single voice. It is the sand-
tana dharma, the hagia sophia, the "justice" or " righte-
ousness" of the tradition, unanimous and universal.
All of Coomaraswamy's " myriad-minded " concen-
tration, together with an almost fabulous self-
discipline and purposive " drive," were yoked together
to demonstrate the single voice of human aspiration.
It is we, the contemporaries, with our genius for fission
and division, who are lost nous sommes les egares I
" We are at war with ourselves," as Coomaraswamy
insists at the end of his compact essay on Rene Gu&ion,
" and therefore at war with one another. Western
man is unbalanced, and the question, Can he recover
himself ? is a very real one."

Coomaraswamy's essay on Gu^non, included in this
book, may be studied as a model of his precision,
accuracy, and mathematical brevity. Within the
space of a few pages, we are presented with a com-
plete and accurate guide to the intellectual career of
one of the most arresting and most significant of con-
temporary thinkers. This introduction to Gu^non is

xiii

The Bugbear of Literacy

worth the price of admission ; for the author of The
Reign of Quantity, of East and West, and The Crisis
of the Modern World seems to have been, for the
American public at least, one of the casualties of the
war. It is reassuring to know that the tudes Tra-
ditionnelles, the monthly periodical which for many
years had been the vehicle of Guenon's expression, has
now resumed publication. And Le rtgne de la quantite
has appeared in book form in Paris.

I can only hope that the present volume may open
the door, to some readers at least, to a whole " new "
realm of thought, as did my belated discovery of
Coomaraswamy some years ago. Even his footnotes
contain more provocative reading and point the way
to more explorations and discoveries than one can ever
find in any of the standard-brand, ready-made, ready-
to-wear opinions proffered in many noisily advertised
best sellers.

Robert Allerton Parker
New York
March, 1946

xiv

I : Am I My Brother's Keeper ?

CAIN, who killed his brother Abel, the herdsman,
and built himself a city, prefigures modern civilization,
one that has been described from within as " a murder-
ous machine, with no conscience and no ideals," 1
" neither human nor normal nor Christian/ 12 and in
fact " an anomaly, not to say a monstrosity." 3 It
has been said : " The values of life are slowly ebbing.
There remains the show of civilization, without any of
its realities." 4 Criticisms such as these could be cited
without end. Modern civilization, by its divorce
from any principle, can be likened to a headless
corpse of which the last motions are convulsive and
insignificant. It is not, however, of suicide, but of
murder that we propose to speak.

The modern traveller " thy name is legion "
proposing to visit some " lost paradise " such as Bali,
often asks whether or not it has yet been " spoiled."
It makes a naive, and even tragic, confession. For
this man does not reflect that he is condemning him-
self ; that what his question asks is whether or not the
sources of equilibrium and grace in the other civilizations
have yet been poisoned by contact with men like him-
self and the culture of which he is a product. " The
Balinese," as Covarrubias says, "have lived well
under a self-sufficient co-operative system, the founda-
tion of which is reciprocal assistance, with money used
only as a secondary commodity. Being extremely
limited in means to obtain the cash scarcer every day
to pay taxes and satisfy new needs, it is to be feared
that the gradual breaking down of their institutions,

The Bugbear of Literacy

together with the drain on their national wealth, will
make coolies, thieves, beggars and prostitutes of the
proud and honourable Balinese of this generation,
and will, in the long run, bring a social and moral
catastrophe. ... It would be futile to recommend
measures to prevent the relentless march of Westerni-
zation ; tourists cannot be kept out, the needs of trade
will not be restricted for sentimental [or moral] reasons,
and missionary societies are often powerful." 5

Sir George Watt in 1912 wrote that " however
much Indian art may be injured, or individuals suffer,
progression in line with the manufacturing enter-
prise of civilization must be allowed free course. 1 ' 6
In the same year Gandhi said that " India is being
ground down, not under the English heel, but under
that of modern civilization." In an open letter to
Gilbert Murray, the late Rabindranath Tagore said,
" There is no people in the whole of Asia which does not
look upon Europe with fear and suspicion." 7 When
I said to a working woman that what the Germans
were doing in Belgium was very dreadful, she retorted,
" Yes, too bad the Belgians should be treated as if
they were Congo Negroes."

Modern civilization takes it for granted that people
are better off the more things they want and are able to
get ; its values are quantitative and material. Now,
How much is he worth ? means How much money has
he got ? A speaker at Boston College lately described
modern Western civilization as a " curse to humanity ";
and those who now recognize its reflection in the Japan-
ese mirror are evidently of the same opinion. Neverthe-
less Henry A. Wallace, then vice-president, in a well-
meant speech, promised that when the war should be
over, " Older [!] nations will have the privilege to help

2

Am I My Brother's Keeper?

younger nations get started on the path to industriali-
zation. ... As their masses learn to read and write,
and as they become productive mechanics, their
standard of living will double and treble/ 18 He did
not speak of the price to be paid, or reflect that an
incessant "progress," never ending in contentment,
means the condemnation of all men to a state of
irremediable poverty. But, as Plato already knew,
" poverty consists, not in the decrease of one's posses-
sions, but in the increase of one's greed," 9 and in the
words of St. Gregory Nazazien,

Could you from all the world all wealth procure.
More would remain, whose lack would leave you poor!

As for reading and writing, I shall only say that the
association of these with " productive mechanics "
(and the " chain belt " that suggests the " chain
gang ") is significant, since these arts are only of
paramount importance to the masses in a quantitative
culture, where one must be able to read both warnings
and advertisements if one is to earn money safely and
" raise one's standard of living " : that if reading and
writing are to enable the Indian and Chinese masses to
read what the Western proletariat reads, they will
remain better off , from any cultural point of view, with
their own more classical literature of which all have
oral knowledge ; and add that it is still true that, as
Sir George Birdwood wrote in 1880, " Our education
has destroyed their love of their own literature . . .
their delight in their own arts and, worst of all, their
repose in their own traditional and national religion.
It has disgusted them with their own homes their
parents, their sisters, their very wives. It has brought

3 B

The Bugbear of Literacy

discontent into every family so far as its baneful
influences have reached." 10

Systems of education should be extensions of the
cultures of the peoples concerned ; but of these the
Western educator knows little and cares less. For
example, O. L. Reiser assumed that, after the war,
American ideals and policies, so far from allowing for
other peoples' cultural self-determination, would
dominate the world and that all divergent religions and
philosophies could and should be discarded in favour of
the " scientific humanism " which should now become
11 the religion of humanity." 11 We can only say that if
Western races are in the future to do anything for the
peoples whose cultures have been broken down in the
interests of commerce and " religion," they must begin
by renouncing what has been aptly called their
" proselytizing fury " " hypocrites, for ye compass
sea and land to make one proselyte." 12

It is overlooked that while many Asiatic peoples, for
reasons sufficiently obvious, are inadequately provided
with the necessities of life, this is by no means true of
all Asiatic peoples. In any case it is overlooked that
it is a basic Asiatic conception that, given the neces-
saries of life, it is a fallacy to suppose that the further
we can go beyond that the better. Where the Euro-
pean seeks to become economically independent in old
age, the Indian map of life proposes for old age an
independence of economics. The " guinea pigs " of
a well-known book, in other words you and I, whose
wants are perpetually exacerbated by the sight and
sound of advertisements (it has been recognized
that " Whole industries are pooling their strength to
ram home a higher standard of living " 13 ), have been

4

Am I My Brother's Keeper?

compared by an Indian writer 14 to another animal
" the donkey before which the driver has dangled a
much coveted carrot hanging from a stick fastened to
its own harness. The more the animal runs to get at
the carrot, the further is the cart drawn " ; i.e. the
higher the dividends paid. We are the donkey, the
manufacturer the driver, and this situation pleases us
so well that we, in the kindness of our hearts, would
like to make donkeys also of the Balinese at the same
time that we ask, " Have they been spoiled yet ? "
" Spoiled " means " degraded " ; but the word has
also another sinister meaning, that of " plundered,"
and there are ways of life as well as material goods of
which one can be robbed.

Let us make it clear that if we approach the problem
of inter-cultural relationships largely on the ground of
art, it is not with the special modern and aesthetic or
sentimental concept of art in mind, but from that
Platonic and once universally human point of view in
which " art " is the principle of manufacture and
nothing but the science of the making of any things
whatever for man's good use, physical and meta-
physical ; and in which, accordingly, agriculture and
cookery, weaving and fishing are just as much arts as
painting and music. However strange this may
appear to us, let us remember that we cannot pretend
to think for others unless we can think with them.
In these contexts, then, " art " involves the whole of
the active life, and presupposes the contemplative.
The disintegration of a people's art is the destruction
of their life, by which they are reduced to the
proletarian status of hewers of wood and drawers of
water, in the interests of a foreign trader, whose is the

5

The Bugbear of Literacy

profit. The employment of Malays on rubber estates,
for example, in no way contributes to their culture and
certainly cannot have made them our friends : they
owe us nothing. We are irresponsible, in a way that
Orientals are not yet, for the most part, irresponsible.

Let me illustrate what I mean by responsibility.
I have known Indians who indignantly refused to buy
shares in a profitable hotel company, because they
would not make money out of hospitality, and an
Indian woman who refused to buy a washing machine,
because then, " What would become of the washer-
man's livelihood ? " For an equal sense of responsi-
bility in a European I can cite the infinite pains that
Marco Pallis took, in selecting gifts for his Tibetan
friends, not to choose anything that might tend to-
ward a destruction of the quality of their standard of
living.

The modern world has, in fact (as was recently re-
marked by Aldous Huxley), abandoned the concept of
" right livelihood," according to which a man could
not be considered a Christian in good standing if he
made his living by usury or speculation, or considered
a Buddhist if he made his living by the manufacture
of weapons or of intoxicating drinks. And as I have
said elsewhere, if there are any occupations that are
not consistent with human dignity, or manufactures
however profitable that are not of real goods, such
occupations and manufactures must be abandoned by
any society that has in view the dignity of all its
members. It is only when measured in terms of
dignity and not merely in terms of comfort that a
" standard of living " can properly be called
" high."

The bases of modern civilization are to such a degree

6

Am I My Brother's Keeper?

rotten to the core that it has been forgotten even by
the learned that man ever attempted to live other-
wise than by bread alone. It had been assumed by
Plato that " it is contrary to the nature of the arts to
seek the good of anything but their object/' 15 and
by St. Thomas Aquinas that "the craftsman is
naturally inclined by justice to do his work faithfully." 16
To what a level industrialism must have lowered the
workman's sense of honour and natural will to do a
" good job " if, in a reference to the mechanics and
groundmen who make and service airplanes, Gilbert
Murray could propound that it is " a quite wonderful
fact that masses of men have been made so trustworthy
and reliable " and could say that "it is the Age of
Machines that, for the first time in history, has made
them so/' 17 That was a part of his apology for
Western civilization, in an open letter to Rabindranath
Tagore. All that this cock and bull airplane story
really means, of course, is that where production is
really for use, and not mainly or only for profit, the
workman is still " naturally inclined to do his work
faithfully." Even to-day, as Mrs. Handy has re-
marked, " Technical perfection remains the ideal of
the Marquesas Island craftsman." 18 In Europe, the
instinct of workmanship has not been extinguished
in human nature, but only suppressed in human
beings working irresponsibly.

Anthropologists, as impartial observers who do not
attempt to consider the arts in vacuo, but in their
relation to the whole structure of society, mince no
words in their description of the effects of Western
contacts on traditional cultures. Mrs. Handy's record
of the Marquesas Islanders, that " the external aspects

7

The Bugbear of Literacy

of their culture have been almost wiped out by the
white man's devastating activities/' 18 is typical of
what could be cited from a hundred other sources.
Of the " savages " of New Guinea Raymond Firth
says that " their art as an expression of complex
social values is of basic importance," but that under
European influence " in nearly every case the quality
of their art has begun to fall off." 19 C. F. Ikte writes
that due to the influence of the Western world
" which is so ready to flood the remainder of our globe
with inferior mass products, thus destroying among
native peoples the concepts of quality and beauty,
together with the joy of creation ... it is a question
whether the beautiful art of Ikat weaving can long
survive in the Dutch East Indies." 20

It is true that we have learned to appreciate the
" primitive arts " ; but only when we have " col-
lected " them. We " preserve " folk songs, at the
same time that our way of life destroys the singer.
We are proud of our museums, where we display
the damning evidence of a way of living that we have
made impossible. These museum " treasures " were
originally the everyday productions of live men ;
but now, " due to the breakdown of culture in the
islands where the objects were made, they may be
studied more satisfactorily in museums," while at their
source these " highly developed and beautiful
techniques have died, or are dying." 21 "Dying,"
because in the words of the knighted fatalist, " pro-
gression in line with the manufacturing enterprise of
modern civilization must be allowed free course " !
To which we can only rejoin that, if it must be that
offences come, " Woe unto them through whom they
come." What, indeed, has lately happened to the

8

Am I My Brother's Keeper?

cities that Cain built ? Let us not assume that " it
can't happen here."

Our " love of art " and " appreciation " of primitive
art, as we call whatever art is abstract and impersonal,
rather than self -expressive or exhibitionist, has not
aroused in our hearts any love for the primitive artist
himself. A more loveless, and at the same time more
sentimentally cynical, culture than that of modern
Europe and America it would be impossible to imagine.
" Seeing through," as it supposes, everything, it cares
for nothing but itself. The passionless reason of its
" objective " scholarship, applied to the study of
" what men have believed," is only a sort of frivolity,
in which the real problem, that of knowing what should
be believed, is evaded. Values are to such an extent
inverted that action, properly means to an end, has
been made an end in itself, and contemplation, pre-
requisite to action, has come to be disparaged as an
" escape " from the responsibilities of activity.

In the present essay we are concerned, not with the
political or economic, but with the cultural relations
that have actually subsisted, and on the other hand
should subsist, as between the peoples who call them-
selves progressive and those whom they call backward,
a type of nomenclature that belongs to the genus of
" the lion painted by himself." Not that we over-
look the sinister relationships that connect your
cultural activities abroad with your political and
economic interests, but that there is the imminent
danger that even when you have made up your minds
to establish political and economic relations with others
on a basis of justice, you will still believe that you have
been entrusted with a " civilizing mission." There is
more than political and economic interest behind the

9

The Bugbear of Literacy

proselytizing fury ; behind all this there is a fanaticism
that cannot away with any sort of wisdom that is not
of its own date and kind and the product of its own
pragmatic calculations : " there is a rancour," as
Hermes Trismegistus said, " that is contemptuous of
immortality, and will not let us recognize what is
divine in us." 22

That is why the export of your " education " is
even more nefarious than your traffic in arms. What
was attempted by the English in India when they
proposed to build up a class of persons " Indian in
blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinion,
in morals and in intellect " (Lord Macaulay) is just
what Middletown, substituting " American " for
" English," would like to do to-day. It is what the
British tried to do in Ireland where " in thirty years
Irish was killed off so rapidly that the whole island
contained fewer speakers in 1891 than the small
province of Connaught alone did thirty years before.
. . . The amount of horrible suffering entailed by this
policy . . . counted for nothing with the Board of
National Education, compared with their great object
of ... the attainment of one Anglified uniformity.
. . . The children are taught, if nothing else, to be
ashamed of their own parents, ashamed of their own
nationality, ashamed of their own names." 23 Every-
one will recognize the pattern, repeated alike in the
case of the " English-educated " Indian and in that of
the American Indian who has been subjected to the
untaught ignorance of public school teachers who can-
not speak his mother tongue.

Such are the fruits of " civilization," and the fruit
betrays the tree. All that can only be atoned for by

10

Am I My Brother's Keeper?

repentance, recantation, and restitution. Of these,
the last is a virtual impossibility ; the fallen redwood
cannot be replanted. A traditional culture still,
however, survives precariously in " unspoiled " oases,
and the least that we can say to the modern world is
this : Whatever else you dispense in " wars of pacifica-
tion " or by way of " peaceful penetration," be good
enough to reserve your " college education " and your
" finishing schools " for home consumption. What you
call your " civilizing mission " is in our eyes nothing
but a form of megalomania. Whatever we need to
learn from you, we shall come to ask you for as the
need is felt. At the same time, if you choose to visit
us, you will be welcome guests, and if there is anything
of ours that you admire, we shall say, " It is yours."

For the rest, it is much more for its own sake than in
order to make restitution that the modern world must
" change its mind " (repent) ; for, as Philosophia said
to Boethius in his distress, " You have forgotten who
you are." But how can this " reasoning and mortal
animal," this extroverted mentality, be awakened,
reminded of itself, and converted from its senti-
mentality and its sole reliance on estimative know-
ledge to the life of the intellect ? How can this world
be given back its meaning ? Not, of course, by a
return to the outward forms of the Middle Ages nor,
on the other hand, by assimilation to any surviving,
Oriental or other, pattern of life. But why not by a
recognition of the principles on which the patterns were
based ? These principles, on which the " unspoiled "
life of the East is still supported, must at least be
grasped, respected, and understood if ever the Western
provincial is to become a citizen of the world. Even
the goodness of the modern world is unprincipled ;

ii

The Bugbear of Literacy

its " altruism " is no longer founded on a knowledge
of the Self of all beings and therefore in the love of
Self, but only on selfish inclination. And what of
those who are not inclined to be unselfish ; is there
any intellectual standard by which they can be
blamed ?

If ever the gulf between East and West, of which
we are made continually more aware as physical
intimacies are forced upon us, is to be bridged, it will
be only by an agreement on principles, and not by any
participation in common forms of government or
methods of manufacture and distribution. It is not,
as Kierkegaard said, new forms of government, but
another Socrates that the world needs. A philosophy
identical with Plato's is still a living force in the East.
We called the modern world a headless body ; in the
Eastern books there is a teaching, how to put heads on
bodies again. It is one of sacrifice and of preoccupa-
tion with realities ; outwardly a rite and inwardly a
being born again.

To propose an agreement on principles does not
involve or imply that the Western world should be
Orientalized; propaganda is out of the question as
between gentlemen, and everyone must make use of
the forms appropriate to his own psychophysical
constitution. It is the European that wants to practice
Yoga ; the Oriental points out that he has already
contemplative disciplines of his own. What is implied
is that a recognition of the principles by which the
East still lives, and which can, therefore, be seen in
operation (and few will question that peoples as yet
" unspoiled " are happier than those that have been
"spoiled"), could lead the modern "world of im-
poverished reality," in which it is maintained that

12

Am 1 My Brother's Keeper ?

" such knowledge as is not empirical is meaningless,"
back to the philosopher who denied the dependence of
knowledge on sensation and maintained that all learn-
ing is recollection.

They cannot help us who, in the words of Plato,
" think that nothing is, except what they can grasp
firmly with their hands." I repeat what I have said
elsewhere, that " the European, for his own sake and
all men's sake in a future world, must not only cease to
harm and exploit the other peoples of the world, but
must also give up the cherished and flattering belief
that he can do them any good otherwise than by being
good himself." I am far from believing that the
European is incapable of goodness.

In conclusion, let me say that the few European
workers in the Eastern field to whom my criticisms
do not apply will be the last to disagree with them.
Also, that what I have been saying is not what you will
hear from the already English-educated and too often
" spoiled " Orientals with whom you are able to con-
verse. 24 I am speaking for a majority, literate and
illiterate, that is not vocal, partly by inclination, and
partly because, in more than one sense, they do not
speak your language. I am speaking for those who
once before " bowed low before the West in patient,
deep disdain," and are not less a power to-day because
you cannot know or hear them.

REFERENCES

1 G. La Piana, in Harvard Divinity School Bulletin,
XXVII, p. 27.

2 Eric Gill, Autobiography (New York, 1942), p. 174.
8 Rene Gunon, East and West (London, 1941), p. 43.

The Bugbear of Literacy

4 A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (1933), p. 358.

6 M. Covarrubias, Island of Bali (1942). Cf. Colin
McPhee, " Ankloeng Gamelans in Bali," Djawa, Nos. 5
and 6, 17de Jaargang (September-December, 1937), p. 348 :
" The last five years, what with the changing tempo of life,
the benefits of education, have seen the most rapid changes
of all, the most irresponsible patching together of hetero-
geneous elements in music and drama. One wonders what
will survive in ten years of what was once an art." Before
we can talk wisely about co-operation it must first of all be
realized that, as the editor of the New English Weekly
recently remarked, " practically the whole of Oriental
humanity, the greater portion of the human race, including
the U.S.S.R., lives in a social aspiration which is the polar
opposite of the American." Any possibilities of co-operation
are bound up with agreement about ends, whereas almost
every proposal nowadays brought forward has only to do
with means, and usually with the application of Western
means to Eastern situations.

Sir George Watt, Indian Art at Delhi (London, 1912),
p. 72. This is the modern form of the Amaurian
(Amalrician) heresy ; the economically determined man,
without free will, is by the same token irresponsible ; no
blame to him, the fault is fate's ! Cf . Sir George Birdwood,
Sva, pp. 84-5 : " England . . . where every national
interest is sacrificed to the shibboleth of unrestricted inter-
national competition ; and where as a consequence,
agriculture, the only sure foundation of society, languishes
... its last result, the bitter, stark and cruel contrast
presented between the West End of London and the East.
And do Europe and America desire to reduce all Asia to an
East End ? " And K. E. Barlow (in Purpose, XI, 1939,
p. 245) : " In our everyday world the principle of exploita-
tion without responsibility has brought a disorder in society
and in Nature which stupefies all of us who think. ... It
has become clear that our civilization is pursuing a course
which cannot long be maintained."

But : " Above all a missionary must be a social reformer,
for life under anything but Christianity is a distortion of

14

Am I My Brother's Keeper?

human nature. . . . Take the native ... get him to act
like a European " (Nicholas Humphries, O.P., and Finbar
Synnot, O.P., in Blackfriars 28, 1947, pp. 316, 321) !
Pallis, Peaks and Lamas, p. 154 : " Rebirth in the humblest
station in Tibet offers fuller possibilities than life in a factory
town of Europe or America, or even life in a manager's
office of a great firm." P. 8 : Tibet " one of the earth's
most civilized peoples."

7 Rabindranath Tagore and Gilbert Murray, Open Letters,
East and West (Paris, 1932), p. 44.

8 Henry A. Wallace, then vice-president, in a speech,
1943. And as the late President Roosevelt truly said,
" Never again must we in the United States isolate our-
selves from the rest of humanity " ; but he showed by
his next words, " I am confident that the foreign trade of
the United States can be trebled after the war providing
millions more jobs," that he had not in mind the root of the
matter, that is, an abandonment of America's cultural
isolation. As for the " price " of industrialism, it must be
recognized, in the first place, that the American " standard
of living," judged by qualitative standards, is beneath
contempt, at the same time that the artist, no longer a
member of society but a parasite upon it, " has become the
Pekinese of the rich " (Erich Meissner's phrase in Germany
in Peril, 1942, p. 42). " The standardized products of our
mills and factories are a disgrace to American civilization "
(Msgr. G. B. O'Toole in Foreword to Krzesinski, 7s Modern
Culture Doomed ? 1942). On the salesman's and producer's
side : " Modern machinery and its irresistible advance fills
these men with mystic frenzy " (Meissner, ibid., p. 115) :
and, " Eventually Man . . . adopts a discipline which
transforms him into a machine himself " (Ernst Niekisch,
quoted by Meissner, ibid.). Vice-President Wallace's words
and two current, and very revealing, American advertise-
ments are a dramatic demonstration. Of the advertise-
ments, one, depicting a salesman behind his counter, puts
into his mouth the words : " Handmade ? Of course not !
Why, most everything in this store is made by machines
nowadays. If it weren't I wouldn't be selling half these

15

The Bugbear of Literacy

things, and you couldn't buy them. They'd cost too much."
The other prints a " poem," called " My Machine," and its
first lines are :

There are many other machines, but this one is mine.
It is a part of me, I am a part of it.

We are one.
It does not stop unless I forget.

There is no reference to the quality, either of man or of
product, in either case.

" On peut remarquer que la machine est, en un certain
sens, le contraire de 1'outil, et non point un ' outil per-
fectionn ' comme beaucoup se 1'imaginent, car 1'outil est
en quelque sort un ' prolongement ' de 1'homme lui-m&ne,
tandis que la machine reduit celui-^i & n'tre plus que son
serviteur (" minder ") ; et, si Ton a pu dire que ' 1'outil
engendra le metier,' il n'est pas moins vrai que la machine
le tue ; les reactions instinctives des artisans contre les
premieres machines s'expliquent par Ik d'elle-mmes "
(Rene Gu6non, Le regne de la quantite et les signes des temps,
2nd ed. ; Paris, 1945, p. 64, note). In Ruskin's words,
" The great cry that rises from all our manufacturing
cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for
this, that we manufacture everything there except men "
Stones of Venice, in Ruskin's works, Vol. X, p. 196) : and,
" This evil cannot be cured through higher wages, good
housing conditions and improved nutrition " (Meissner,
ibid., p. 42). " If your real ideals are those of materialistic
efficiency, then the sooner you know your own mind, and
face the consequences, the better. . . . The more highly
industrialized a country, the more easily a materialistic
philosophy will flourish in it, and the more deadly that
philosophy will be. ... And the tendency of unlimited
industrialism is to create masses of men and women
detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and
susceptible to mass suggestion : in other words, a mob.
And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed,
well housed, and well disciplined " (T. S. Eliot in The Idea
of a Christian Society).

16

Am I My Brother's Keeper?

To-day : " the scientific conception of man . . .
supplants an older and more natural pattern of thought,
the theological conception of man. . . . The theological
conception is based on certain assumptions. First, that
each man has a sacred and indestructible aspect. . . .
Naive (!) as this idea is, the theological conception gave
each individual an inalienable dignity. . . . (Later,) the
political and utilitarian conception of man . . . began to
dominate his worldly existence. This deterioration was
fatal to the preservation of the dignity of the individual
. . . half of him became a commodity like potatoes, a used
object whose value fluctuated with demand . . . This
deterioration was naturally hastened by the machine, whose
attributes man gradually assumed . . . the matter of
survival reduces itself to the question of whether the science
of man can progress more rapidly than the tendency of man
to destroy himself " (Abram Kardiner, " Western
Personality and Social Crisis," Commentary 2, Nov., 1946,

PP. 437;8).

"It is doubtful whether life can be significantly lived
without conscious relation to some tradition. Those who
do live without it live as a kind of moral proletariat,
without roots and without loyalties. For to be significant
life needs form, and form is the outcome of a quality of
thought and feeling which shapes a tradition " (Dorothy
M. Emmet in The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking, 1946,

P- 163).

More than a physical well-being is necessary for felicity.
An Indian peasant's face has neither the vacancy of the
greedy children, grinning apes and whores that are the ideal
of the American advertiser, nor the expression of anxiety
that marks the American " common man " in real life.
" In spite of our enormous technological advances we are
spiritually, and as humane beings, not the equals of the
average Australian aboriginal or the average Eskimo we
are very definitely their inferiors " (M. F. Ashley Montagu,
" Socio-Biology of Man," Scientific Monthly, June, 1942,

P- 49).
Cf. Traherne, Centuries 3.12 : " Verily, there is no savage

The Bugbear of Literacy

nation under the cope of Heaven, that is more absurdly
barbarous than the Christian world."

Plato, Laws 737E.

10 Sir John Birdwood, Industrial Arts of India (1880).

11 0. L. Reiser, A New Earth and a New Humanity (New
York, 1942), p. 209.

12 Matthew xxiii.is.

18 " It is open to question whether anything a machine
turns out for direct human use is productive of human
good " (in the Nation, November 27, 1943). Cf. L. Ziegler
in Forum Philosophicum I, 86, 87, 88 : " Work is first and
foremost no financial, but a human and social expression of
one's being. Every ware which does not answer an
existing need is above all the most superfluous thing in the
world ... it must first artificially rouse up a need in
places where a need does not exist. . . . Present day
economic management is framed for the stimulation, yes,
even for the ' creation ' of needs ... as if wages and income
could in any way keep pace with this artificially aroused
need for a commodity. . . . The fashionably altering
display of goods attaches to so unlimited a mass and variety
of wares a label of necessity, that in the face of it even the
purchasing power of the rich is beaten, whereas the poor
seem doomed to a poverty hitherto undreamt of. From
this point of view modern finance reveals itself as the
enemy of society, yes, even as the destroyer of society."
For, observe that, as Albert Schweitzer says, " Whenever
the timber trade is good, permanent famine reigns in the
Ogowe region." Modern wars, in fact, are fought for
world markets ; in other words, in order that all
" backward " peoples may be forced to purchase an
annual quota of gadgets from those who call themselves
" advanced."

Here it is, however, with the moral effects of manufacture
for profit that we are concerned, and especially with its
effect on those who are forced on the one hand to provide
the raw materials, and on the other to buy the manufactured
gadgets. It is not merely that the change from a barter to
a money economy is actually " from an economy of

18

Am I My Brother's Keeper?

abundance to one of scarcity " (Parsons, Pueblo Indian
Religion, 1939, p. 1144), but that it is a matter of the
poisoning of the lives of contented peoples, whose culture
is destroyed to satisfy the saurian greed of the plutocratic
" democracies." In the Balkans, for example, " There
were two sorts of people. There was the people as it had
been since the beginning of time, working in the villages,
small towns and capitals. But there was also a new people,
begotten by the new towns which the industrial and
financial development of the nineteenth century had raised
all over Europe. . . . This new sort of people [was one
that] had been defrauded of their racial tradition, they
enjoyed no inheritance of wisdom ; brought up without
gardens, to work on machines, all but a few lacked the
education which is given by craftsmanship ; and they
needed this wisdom and this education as never before,
because they were living in conditions of unprecedented
frustration and insecurity " (Rebecca West, in Black Lamb
and Grey Falcon).

" The rise of science, the discrediting of religion, and the
abiding triumph of capitalism have focused the basic
personality of Western man upon one goal, success, the
only proof of which is the endless acquisition of money. . . .
But this kind of training, as it emphasizes striving for self-
esteem and success, releases at the same time the extra-
ordinary aggressiveness which takes so many cruel forms.
Aggressiveness turned inward results in masochism, feelings
of inferiority, passivity, and other kinds of weakness.
Turned outward, the result is sadism, extreme rivalry,
envy, and conflict, the social climax being war. Competi-
tion, which motivates the entire psychological formation, is
not in itself evil, since it may create a strong and self-reliant
human being ; but in a scarcity economy such as ours the
combination of the social system with a basic personality
focused on competition for success overburdens the lives
of most human beings with tensions and insecurities for
which only one term is adequate lifelong neuroticism"
(Delmore Schwartz, reviewing Abram Kardiner, The
Individual and His Society and The Psychological Frontiers

19 c

The Bugbear of Literacy

of Society, 1939 and 1945, in The Nation, Jan. 12, 1946,
pp. 46-48).

" To-day under the centralized economic order, we appear
to be descending below the level of the beast, hating,
exploiting each other on a world scale, and reducing the
average man to a standardized automaton incapable of
thinking for himself " (Bharatan Kumarappa, Capitalism,
Socialism, or Villagism ?, 1946, p. 194). " Validation of
success in terms of externals has become the mark of our
civilization. In such a value-system human relations take
on the values of the salesman. . . . Competition is the
most powerful law of the land. Under such conditions men
everywhere become nasty, brutish, and cruel. . . . Unless
Western man is able to release himself from the degrading
tyranny of his enslavement to the religion of economics he is
as certainly doomed to self-destruction as all the portents
indicate that he is. 11 (M. F. Ashley Montagu in School and
Society, vol. 65, No. 1696, 1947, pp. 465-469).

There can be no possible doubt that what men now
understand by " civilization " is an essentially vicious and
destructive force, or that what is called " progress " is both
suicidal and murderous. " Civilization, as we now have it,
can only end in disaster " (G. H. Estabrooks, Man the
Mechanical Misfit, New York, 1941, p. 246) ; or as C. H.
Grattan and G. R. Leighton so well say, " No one looking
for peace and quiet has any business talking about inter-
national trade." (in Harper's Magazine, August, 1944). Of
all these things the catastrophes of to-day are only a
beginning.

14 J. C. Kumarappa. Cf. Philo Judaeus, De specialibus
legibus IV, 80 f.

" Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can
be trusted with machines. Only such a people will so
contrive and control those machines that their products are
an enhancement of biological needs, and not a denial of
them. Only such a people will be secure from the debili-
tating effects of mass production and mass unemployment
(miscalled ' leisure '). Only such a people, with sensations
still vivid and intelligence ever active, can hope to form a

20

Am I My Brother's Keeper ?

stable and integrated society in the industrial world of the
future." (Herbert Read, The Grass Roots of Art, 1946).

15 Republic, 342 B, 347 A, etc,

18 Summa Theologica, I-II, 57, 3 and 2. Justitia here =
8ixatooih>77 = dharma, here as in Plato, Republic, 433 A,
and in Matthew vi:33, where the word is rendered by
" righteousness," with some loss of force.

17 Open Letters, East and West.

18 Art des lies Marquises (1938). Cf. the words of two
reviewers of J. F. Embree's Suye Mura, a Japanese Village :
One remarks that here " we see a little group of Japanese
families living, working, struggling in their daily life to earn
their bread, to educate their children, and to live out lives of
ordinary usefulness, in the way common to people every-
where " ; the other that " his book offers good evidence
that it will take many a long year to Westernize the
Japanese peasant." The more " long years " the better for
the peace and happiness of the Japanese peasants and of
the world !

David N. Rowe China Among the Powers (New York)
" the psychology of the Chinese industrial labourer is not
in harmony with modern machine industry as it is known
in the West."

Contrast also the words of H. N. Brailsford, " The caste
line will have to be broken, if industrial work is to be
provided for the superfluous cultivators," with those of the
sociologist S. Chandrasekhar, who points out that " the
development of cotton textile-mill industry in India, which
to-day employs about 430,000 workers, has actually been
responsible for throwing out of employment an estimated
total of 6 million handloom workers, who have been forced
to fall back upon an already overcrowded agrarian
economy " ; and consider whether Gandhi's cult of the
spinning wheel is not a more practical and realistic way of
dealing with India's poverty than Mr. Brailsford's.

It is rather obvious that " labour-saving " devices are
causes of unemployment. What does Mr. Brailsford propose
to do with his superfluous hands ? Pay them a dole ? " We
can find labour (i.e., a livelihood) for our people only if we

21

The Bugbear of Literacy

turn away from large-scale factory production and take to
small-scale cottage enterprise " (Bh. Kumarappa, Capital-
ism, Socialism or Villagism ?, p. 127).

19 Art and Life in New Guinea (1936), pp. 31, 32. Cf. Tom
Harrisson, Savage Civilisation, passim.

20 Bobbin and Needle Club (New York, 1931), XV, p. 56.
21 G. A. Reichard, Melanesian Design (1931), pp. i, 90.
" As one looks backward at the road Whites and Indians

have travelled together, and at their relationships to-day,
one cannot help wondering if America is really prepared to
lead the world in race tolerance and international peace "
(A. H. and D. C. Leighton, The Navaho Door, Cambridge,
1944).

A Ceylonese correspondent recently asked me : " If God
appeared on earth, and inquired for the Aztecs, Incas, Red
Indians, Australian aborigines, and other slowly dis-
appearing races, would the civilized nations take him to
your great museum ? "

22 Asclepius 1. 12 b (Scott, Hermetica, 1.309).

28 Douglas Hyde, Literary History of Ireland (1899),
pp. 630-44-

24 For example, Professor F. S. C. Northrop in his Meeting
of East and West, 1946, p. 434, quotes the " cultivated
humanist " Jawaharlal Nehru to prove that " the younger
Indians and other Orientals " are anxious to learn " what
the West has to teach of science and its applications," which
is true enough, but hardly to the point in a book intended
to show that Eastern and Western ideologies are unlike ; he
overlooks Shri Bharatan Kumarappa, who says that " we
must be clear in our minds as to what exactly we want to
work for mere material prosperity or human develop-
ment," and complains that among socialists " the question
of whether aa abundance of goods is necessary for human
well-being is never so much as raised."

II : The Bugbear of Literacy

IT was possible for Aristotle, 1 starting from the
premise that a man, being actually cultured, may also
become literate, to ask whether there is a necessary
or merely an accidental connection of literacy with
culture. Such a question can hardly arise for those
to whom illiteracy implies, as a matter of course,
ignorance, backwardness, unfitness for self-govern-
ment : for you, unlettered peoples are uncivilized
peoples, and vice versa as a recent publisher's blurb
expresses it : " The greatest force in civilization is the
collective wisdom of a literate people."

There are reasons for this point of view ; they inhere
in the distinction of a people, or folk, from a proletariat,
that of a social organism from a human ant heap.
For a proletariat, literacy is a practical and cultural
necessity. We may remark in passing that necessities
are not always goods in themselves, out of their con-
text ; some, like wooden legs, are advantageous only
to men already maimed. However that may be, it
remains that literacy is a necessity for you, and
from both points of view ; (i) because our indus-
trial system can only be operated and profits can
only be made by men provided with at least an
elementary knowledge of the " three R's " ; and (2)
because, where there is no longer any necessary con-
nection between one's " skill " (now a timesaving
" economy of motion " rather than a control of the
product) and one's "wisdom," the possibility of
culture depends so much on an ability to read the best
books. I say " possibility " here because, whereas

23

The Bugbear of Literacy

the literacy actually produced by compulsory mass
education often involves little or no more than an
ability and the will to read the newspapers and adver-
tisements, an actually cultured man under these con-
ditions will be one who has studied many books in
many languages, and this is not a kind of knowledge
that can be handed out to everyone under " compul-
sion " (even if any nation could afford the needed
quantity and quality of teachers) or that could be
acquired by everyone, however ambitious.

I have allowed that in industrial societies, where it is
assumed that man is made for commerce and where men
are cultured, if at all, in spite of rather than because of
their environment, literacy is a necessary skill. It will
naturally follow that if, on the principle that misery
loves company, you are planning to industrialize the
rest of the world, you are also in duty bound to train it
in Basic English, or words to that effect American is
already a language of exclusively external relationships,
a tradesman's tongue lest the other peoples should
be unable to compete effectively with us. Competition
is the life of trade, and gangsters must have rivals.

In the present article we are concerned with some-
thing else, viz., the assumption that, even for societies
not yet industrialized, literacy is "an unqualified
good and an indispensible condition of culture." 2
The vast majority of the world's population is still
unindustrialized and unlettered, and there are peoples
still " unspoiled " (in the interior of Borneo) : but the
average American who knows of no other way of
living than his own, judges that " unlettered " means
" uncultured," as if this majority consisted only of a
depressed class in the context of his own environment.
It is because of this, as well as for some meaner reasons,

24

The Bugbear of Literacy

not unrelated to " imperial " interests, that when men
propose not merely to exploit but also to educate
" the lesser breeds without the [i.e. their] law " they
inflict upon them profound, and often lethal, injuries.
I say " lethal " rather than " fatal " here because it
is precisely a destruction of their memories that is
involved. Men overlook that " education " is never
creative, but a two-edged weapon, always destructive ;
whether of ignorance or of knowledge depending upon
the educator's wisdom or folly. Too often fools rush
in where angels might fear to tread.

As against the complacent prejudice we shall essay
to show (i) that there is no necessary connection of
literacy with culture, and (2) that to impose our
literacy (and our contemporary "literature ") upon a
cultured but illiterate people is to destroy their culture
in the name of our own. For the sake of brevity we
shall assume without argument that " culture " implies
an ideal quality and a good form that can be realized
by all men irrespective of condition : and, since we are
treating of culture chiefly as expressed in words, we
shall identify culture with " poetry " ; not having in
view the kind of poetry that nowadays babbles of
green fields or that merely reflects social behaviour
or our private reactions to passing events, but with
reference to that whole class of prophetic literature that
includes the Bible, the Vedas, the Edda, the great
epics, and in general the world's " best books," and
the most philosophical if we agree with Plato that
" wonder is the beginning of philosophy." Of these
" books " many existed long before they were written
down, many have never been written down, and others
have been or will be lost.

I shall have now to make some quotations from the

25

The Bugbear of Literacy

works of men whose " culture " cannot be called in
question ; for while the merely literate are often very
proud of their literacy, such as it is, it is only by men
who are " not only literate but also cultured " that it
has been widely recognized that " letters " at their best
are only a means to an end and never an end in them-
selves, or, indeed, that " the letter kills." A " liter-
ary " man, if ever there was one, the late Professor
G. L. Kittredge writes: 8 "It requires a combined
"effort of the reason and the imagination to conceive a
poet as a person who cannot write, singing or reciting
his verses to an audience that cannot read. . . . The
ability of oral tradition to transmit great masses of
verse for hundreds of years is proved and admitted.
... To this oral literature, as the French call it,
education is no friend. Culture destroys it, sometimes
with amazing rapidity. When a nation begins to read
. . . what was once the possession of the folk as a whole,
becomes the heritage of the illiterate only, and soon,
unless it is gathered up by the antiquary, vanishes
altogether." Mark, too, that this oral literature once
belonged " to the whole people . . . the community
whose intellectual interests are the same from the top
of the social structure to the bottom," while in the
reading society it is accessible only to antiquaries, and
is no longer bound up with everyday life. A point of
further importance is this : that the traditional oral
literatures interested not only all classes, but also all
ages of the population ; while the books that are nowa-
days written expressly " for children " are such as no
mature mind could tolerate ; it is now only the comic
strips that appeal alike to children who have been
given nothing better and at the same time to " adults "
who have never grown up.

26

The Bugbear of Literacy

It is in just the same way that music is thrown away ;
folk songs are lost to the people at the same time that
. they are collected and " put in a bag " ; and in the
same way that the " preservation " of a people's art
in folk museums is a funeral rite, for preservatives are
only necessary when the patient has already died.
Nor must we suppose that " community singing " can
take the place of folk song ; its level can be no higher
than that of the Basic English in which our under-
graduates must be similarly drilled, if they are to under-
stand even the language of their elementary text-
books.

In other words, " Universal compulsory education,
of the type introduced at the end of the last century,
has not fulfilled expectations by producing happier
and more effective citizens ; on the contrary, it has
created readers of the yellow press and cinema-goers lj
(Karl Otten) . A master who can himself not only read,
but also write good classical Latin and Greek, remarks
that " there is no doubt of the quantitative increase in
literacy of a kind, and amid the general satisfaction
that something is being multiplied it escapes enquiry
whether the something is profit or deficit. " He is
discussing only the " worst effects " of enforced literacy,
and concludes : " Learning and wisdom have often
been divided ; perhaps the clearest result of modem
literacy has been to maintain and enlarge the
gulf/' 2

Douglas Hyde remarks that " in vain have disin-
terested visitors opened wide eyes of astonishment at
schoolmasters who knew no Irish being appointed to
teach pupils who knew no English. . . . Intelligent
children endowed with a vacabulary in every day use ol
about three thousand words enter the Schools of the

27

The Bugbear of Literacy

Chief Commissioner, to come out at the end with their
natural vivacity gone, their intelligence almost com-
pletely sapped, their splendid command of their native
language lost for ever, and a vocabulary of five or six
hundred English words, badly pronounced and bar-
barously employed, substituted for it. ... Story, lay,
poem, song, aphorism, proverb, and the unique stock
in trade of an Irish speaker's mind, is gone for ever, and
replaced by nothing. . . . The children are taught, if
nothing else, to be ashamed of their own parents,
ashamed of their own nationality, ashamed of their own
names. ... It is a remarkable system of ' educa-
tion ' " 4 this system that you, " civilized and
literate " Americans, have inflicted upon your own
Amerindians, and that all imperial races are still
inflicting upon their subjected peoples, and would
like to impose upon their allies the Chinese, for
example.

The problem involved is both of languages and what
is said in them. As for language, let us bear in mind,
in the first place, that no such thing as a " primitive
language," in the sense of one having a limited vocabu-
lary fitted only to express the simplest external
relationships, is known. Much rather, that is a
condition to which, under certain circumstances and
as the result of " nothing-morist " philosophies,
languages tend, rather than one from which they
originate ; for example, 90 per cent of our American
" literacy " is a two-syllabled affair. 6

In the seventeenth century Robert Knox said of the
Cingalese that " their ordinary Plough-men and
Husbandmen do speak elegantly, and are full of
complement. And there is no difference of ability
and speech of a Country-man and a Courtier." 6

28

The Bugbear of Literacy

Abundant testimony to the like effect could be cited
from all over the world. Thus of Gaelic, J. F. Camp-
bell wrote, " I am inclined to think that dialect the
best which is spoken by the most illiterate in the islands
. . . men with clear heads and wonderful memories,
generally very poor and old, living in remote corners
of remote islands, and speaking only Gaelic," 7 and
he quotes Hector Maclean, who says that the loss of
their oral literature is due " partly to reading . . .
partly to bigoted religious ideas, and partly to narrow
utilitarian views " which are, precisely, the three
typical forms in which modern civilization impresses
itself upon the older cultures. Alexander Carmichael
says that " the people of Lews, like the people of the
Highlands and Islands generally, carry the Scriptures
in their minds and apply them in their speech. . . .
Perhaps no people had a fuller ritual of song and story,
of secular rite and religious ceremony . . . than the
ill-understood and so-called illiterate Highlanders
of Scotland." 8

St. Barbe Baker tells us that in Central Africa " my
trusted friend and companion was an old man who
could not read or write, though well versed in
stories of the past. . . . The old chiefs listened
enthralled. . . . Under the present system of educa-
tion there is grave risk that much of this may be lost."'
W. G. Archer points out that " unlike the English
system in which one could pass one's life without com-
ing into contact with poetry, the Uraon tribal system
uses poetry as a vital appendix to dancing, marriages
and the cultivation of a crop functions in which all
Uraons join as a part of their tribal life," adding that
" if we have to single out the factor which caused the
decline of English village culture, we should have to say

29

The Bugbear of Literacy

it was literacy. 1 ' 10 In an older England, as Prior and
Gardner remind us, " even the ignorant and unlettered
man could read the meaning of sculptures that now
only trained archeologists can interpret." 11

The anthropologist Paul Radin points out that " the
distortion in our whole psychic life and in our whole
apperception of the external realities produced by the
invention of the alphabet, the whole tendency of which
has been to elevate thought and thinking to the rank of
the exclusive proof of all verities, never occurred
among primitive peoples," adding that "it must be
explicitly recognized that in temperament and in
capacity for logical and symbolical thought, there is
no difference between civilized and primitive man,"
and as to " progress," that none in ethnology will ever
be achieved " until scholars rid themselves, once and
for all, of the curious notion that everything possesses
an evolutionary history ; until they realize that certain
ideas and certain concepts are as ultimate for man " ia
as his physical constitution. " The distinction of
peoples in a state of nature from civilized peoples can
no longer be maintained." 18

We have so far considered only the dicta of literary
men. A really " savage " situation and point of view
are recorded by Tom Harrisson, from the New Hebrides.
" The children are educated by listening and watching.
. . . Without writing, memory is perfect, tradition
exact. The growing child is taught all that is known.
. . . Intangible things co-operate in every effort of
making, from conception to canoe-building. . . . Songs
are a form of story-telling. . . . The lay-out and con-
tent in the thousand myths which every child learns
(often word perfect, and one story may last for hours)
are a whole library . . . the hearers are held in a web

30

The Bugbear of Literacy

of spun words " ; they converse together " with
that accuracy and pattern of beauty in words that we
have lost." And what do they think of us ? " The
natives easily learn to write after white impact.
They regard it as a curious and useless performance.
They say : ' Cannot a man remember and speak ? ' " 14
They consider us " mad," and may be right.

When you set out to " educate " the South Sea
Islanders it is generally in order to make them more
useful to yourselves (this was admittedly the begin-
ning of "English education" in India), or to "con-
vert " them to your way of thinking ; not having in
view to introduce them to Plato. But if we or they
should happen upon Plato, it might startle both to
find that their protest, " Cannot a man remember ? "
is also his. 15 " For," he says, " this invention [of
letters] will produce forget fulness in the mind of those
who learn to use it, because they will not exercise their
memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external
characters which are no part of themselves, will dis-
courage the use of their own memory within thenu
You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of
reminding ; and you offer your pupils the appearance
of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many
things without teaching, and will therefore seem to
know many things [Professor E. K. Rand's "more
and more of less and less "], when they are for the most
part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are
not wise but only wiseacres." He goes on to say that
there is another kind of " word," of higher origin and
greater power than the written (or as we should say,
the printed) word ; and maintains that the wise man,
" when in earnest, will not write in ink " dead words
that cannot teach the truth effectively, but will sow

The Bugbear of Literacy

the seeds of wisdom in souls that are able to receive
them and so " to pass them on for ever."

There is nothing strange or peculiar in Plato's
point of view ; it is one, for example, with which every
cultured Indian unaffected by modern European
influences would agree wholly. It will suffice to cite
that great scholar of Indian languages, Sir George A.
Grierson, who says that " the ancient Indian system
by which literature is recorded not on paper but on the
memory, and carried down from generation to genera-
tion of teachers and pupils, is still [1920] in complete
survival in Kashmir. Such fleshly tables of the heart
are often more trustworthy than birch bark or paper
manuscripts. The reciters, even when learned Pandits,
take every care to deliver the messages word for word,"
and records taken down from professional storytellers
are thus " in some respects more valuable than any
written manuscript. '" lfl

From the Indian point of view a man can only be
said to know what he knows by heart ; what he must go
to a book to be reminded of, he merely knows of.
There are hundreds of thousands of Indians even now
who daily repeat from knowledge by heart either the
whole or some large part of the Bhagavad Gttd ; others
more learned can recite hundreds of thousands of
verses of longer texts. It was from a travelling village
singer in Kashmir that I first heard sung the Odes of
the classical Persian poet, Jalalu'd-DIn Rumi. From
the earliest times, Indians have thought of the learned
man, not as one who has read much, but as one who
has been profoundly taught. It is much rather from
a master than from any book that wisdom can be
learned.

We come now to the last part of our problem, which

32

The Bugbear of Literacy

has to do with the characteristic preoccupations of the
oral and the written literature ; for although no hard
and fast line can be drawn between them, there is a
qualitative and thematic distinction, as between
literatures that were originally oral and those that are
created, so to speak, on paper " In the beginning was
the WORD." The distinction is largely of poetry from
prose and myth from fact. The quality of oral litera-
ture is essentially poetical, its content essentially
mythical, and its preoccupation with the spiritual
adventures of heroes : the quality of originally written
literature is essentially prosaic, its content literal, and
its preoccupation with secular events and with person-
alities. In saying "poetical" we mean to imply
" mantic," and are naturally taking for granted that
the " poetic " is a literary quality, and not merely a
literary (versified) form. Contemporary poetry is
essentially and inevitably of the same calibre as modern
prose ; both are equally opinionated, and the best in
either embodies a few " happy thoughts " rather than
any certainty. As a famous gloss expresses it, " Un-
belief is for the mob." We who can call an art
" significant/ 1 knowing not of what, are also proud to
" progress/ 1 we know not whither.

Plato maintains that one who is in earnest will not
write, but teach ; and that if the wise man writes at
all, it will be either only for amusement mere " belles
lettres " or to provide reminders for himself when his
memory is weakened by old age. We know exactly
what Plato means by the words " in earnest " ; it is
not about human affairs or personalities, but about the
eternal verities, the nature of real being, and the
nourishment of our immortal part, that the wise man
will be in earnest. Our mortal part can survive " by

33

The Bugbear of Literacy

bread alone," but it is by the Myth that our Inner Man
is fed ; or, if we substitute for the true myths the
propagandist myths of " race," " uplift," " progress,"
and " civilizing mission," the Inner Man starves. The
written text, as Plato says, can serve those whose
memories have been weakened by old age. Thus it is
that in the senility of culture it has been found neces-
sary to " preserve " the masterpieces of art in museums,
and at the same time to record in writing and so also
to " preserve " (if only for scholars) as much as can be
" collected " of oral literatures that would otherwise
be lost for ever; and this must be done before it is
too late.

All serious students of human societies are agreed
that agriculture and handicraft are essential founda-
tions of any civilization ; the primary meaning of the
word being that of making a home for oneself. But, as
Albert Schweitzer says, " We proceed as if not agri-
culture and handicraft, but reading and writing
were the beginning of civilization," and, " from schools
which are mere copies of those of Europe they
[natives] are turned out as 'educated* persons, that
is, who think themselves superior to manual work,
and want to follow only commercial or intellectual
callings . . . those who go through the schools are
mostly lost to agriculture and handicraft." 17 As that
great missionary, Charles Johnson of Zululand, also
said, " the central idea [of the mission schools] was to
prize individuals off the mass of the national life."

Our literary figures of thought, for example, the
notions of " culture " (analogous to agriculture),
"wisdom" (originally "skill"), and "asceticism"
(originally " hard work "), are derived from the pro-
ductive and constructive arts ; for, as St. Bonaventura

34

The Bugbear of Literacy

says, " There is nothing therein which does not bespeak
a true wisdom, and it is for this reason that Holy
Scripture very properly makes use of such similes." 18
In normal societies, the necessary labours of production
and construction are no mere " jobs," but also rites,
and the poetry and music that are associated with them
are a kind of liturgy. The " lesser mysteries " of the
crafts are a natural preparation for the greater
" mysteries of the kingdom of heaven." But for us,
who can no longer think in terms of Plato's divine
" justice " of which the social aspect is vocational,
that Christ was a carpenter and the son of a carpenter
was only an historical accident ; we read, but do not
understand that where we speak of primary matter as
" wood/' we must also speak of Him " through whom
all things were made " as a " carpenter." At the best,
we interpret the classical figures of thought, not in
their universality but as figures of speech invented by
individual authors. Where literacy becomes an only
skill, " the collective wisdom of a literate people "
may be only a collective ignorance while " back-
ward communities are the oral libraries of the world's
ancient cultures." 19

The purpose of your educational activities abroad is
to assimilate our pupils to your own ways of thinking
and living. It is not easy for any foreign teacher to
acknowledge Ruskin's truth, that there is one way only
to help others, and that that is, not to train them in
one's own way of living (however bigoted our faith in
it may be), but to find out what they have been trying
to do, and were doing before we came, and if possible
help them to do it better. Some Jesuit missionaries
in China are actually sent to remote villages and re-
quired to earn their living there by the practice of an

35 D

The Bugbear of Literacy

indigenous craft for at least two years before they are
allowed to teach at all. Some such condition as this
ought to be imposed upon all foreign teachers, whether
in mission or government schools. How dare you
forget that you are dealing with peoples "whose
intellectual interests are the same from the top of the
social structure to the bottom," and for whom your
unfortunate distinctions of religious from secular learn-
ing, fine from applied art, and significance from use
have not yet been made ? When you have introduced
these distinctions and have divided an " educated "
from a still " illiterate " class, it is to the latter that we
must turn if we want to study the language, the poetry,
and the whole culture of these peoples, " before it is
too late."

In speaking of a " proselytizing fury " in a former
article I had not only in view the activities of professed
missionaries but more generally those of everyone bent
by the weight of the white man's burden and anxious
to confer the " blessings " of their own civilization
upon others. What lies below this fury, of which your
punitive expeditions and " wars of pacification " are
only more evident manifestations ? It would not be
too much to say that educational activities abroad (a
word that must be taken to include the American
Indian reservations) are motivated by an intention
to destroy existing cultures. And that is not only,
I think, because of your conviction of the absolute
superiority of your Kultur, and consequent contempt
and hatred for whatever else you have not understood
(all those for whom the economic motive is not decisive) ,
but grounded in an unconscious and deep-rooted envy
of the serenity and leisure that we cannot help but
recognize in people whom we call " unspoiled." It

36

The Bugbear of Literacy

irks you that these others, who are neither, as you are,
industrialized nor, as you are, " democratic," should
nevertheless be contented ; you feel bound to discontent
them, and especially to discontent their women, who
might learn from us to work in factories or to find
careers. I used the word Kultur deliberately just now,
because there is not much real difference between the
Germans' will to enforce their culture upon the back-
ward races of the rest of Europe and our determination
to enforce our own upon the rest of the world ; the
methods employed in their case may be more evidently
brutal, but the kind of will involved is the same. 20
As I implied above, that " misery loves company "
is the true and unacknowledged basis of our will to
create a brave new world of uniformly literate mechan-
ics. This was recently repeated to a group of young
American workmen, one of whom responded, " And
are we miserable ! "

But however you may be whistling in the dark when
you pride yourselves upon " the collective wisdom of a
literate people/ 1 regardless of what is read by the
" literates," the primary concern of the present essay
is not with the limitations and defects of modern
Western education in situ, but with the spread of an
education of this type elsewhere. My real concern is
with the fallacy involved in the attachment of an
absolute value to literacy, and the very dangerous
consequences that are involved in the setting up of
" literacy " as a standard by which to measure the
cultures of unlettered peoples. Your blind faith in
literacy not only obscures for us the significance of
other skills, so that you care not under what subhuman
conditions a man may have to earn his living, if only he
can read, no matter what, in his hours of leisure ; it

37

The Bugbear of Literacy

is also one of the fundamental grounds of inter-racial
prejudice and becomes a prime factor in the spiritual
impoverishment of all the " backward " people whom
you propose to " civilize."

REFERENCES

1 Metaphysics, VI : 2, 4, and XI : 8, 12. " Reading, for
a man devoid of prior-understanding, is like a blind man's
looking in a mirror " (Garuda Pur ana t XVI : 82).

" It is far better for an individual not to know how to
read than not to know how to choose the subject of his
reading (Fernando Nobre, The Demophile Government, 1947,
118) ; " The illiteracy of Pachperwa seemed infinitely
preferable to the literacy of New York " (Gertrude Emerson,
Voiceless India).

2 Walter Shewring, " Literacy," in the Dictionary of
World Literature, 1943. " We are becoming culturally
illiterate faster than all these agencies are managing to
make us literate in the use of the potentialities of the
culture" (Robert S. Lynd, in Knowledge for What?).
Professor John U. Nef of Chicago, speaking at Mainline
University in 1944, remarked : " In spite of the alleged
great spread of literacy [in America] . . . the proportion
of the population who can communicate with each other
on a relatively high level of discourse is very much smaller
than it was." A recent study sponsored by the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching found that
" the average senior in six colleges recognized only 61 out
of 100 words in familiar use by educated people " ! In view
of all the facts, it is indeed astonishing to find Lord Raglan
saying : " By savage I mean illiterate " (in the Rationalist
Annual, 1946, p. 43). There was a time, indeed, when the
English bourgeoisie thought of the Gaelic Highlanders as
" savages " ; but from an anthropologist one would expect
a refutation of such " myths," rather than their revival !

8 F, G. Childe, English and Scottish Popular Ballads,

38

The Bugbear of Literacy

Introduction by G. L. Kittredge. Cf. W. W. Comfort,
Chrdtien de Troyes (Everyman's Library), Introduction :
Chretien's poetry " was intended for a society that was still
homogeneous, and to it at the outset doubtless all classes
of the population listened with equal interest." Nothing of
this kind is or can be achieved by the organized and com-
pulsory education of to-day " a province of its own,
detached from life " with its " atmosphere of intense bore-
dom that damps the vitality of the young " and of which
" the result is : the young people do not know anything
really well," or as " it would be more exact to say, they do
not know what knowledge is," which " explains the danger-
ous gullibility which propaganda exploits " (Erich Meissner,
Germany in Peril, 1942, pp. 47, 48).

4 Douglas Hyde, Literary History of Ireland, 1903, p. 633.

6 American is already " a one-dimensional public
language, a language oriented to the description of external
aspects of behaviour, weak in overtones . . . our words
lack . . . the formal precision which comes from awareness
of past and different usage " (Margaret Mead, And Keep
Your Powder Dry, 1942, p. 82). Any author who uses words
precisely is liable to be misunderstood.

" Perhaps at no other time have men been so knowing
and yet so unaware, so burdened with purposes and so
purposeless, so disillusioned and so completely the victims
of illusion. This strange contradiction pervades our entire
modern culture, our science and our philosophy, our
literature and our art" (W. M. Urban, The Intelligible
World, 1929, p. 172). Under such conditions, ability to
read a printed page becomes a mere trick, and is no
guarantee whatever of power to grasp or to communicate
ideas.

6 Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon, 1681
(1911 ed., p. 168).

7 J. F. Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands
(1890 ed., pp. v, xxiii, cxxii).

8 Alexander Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica, Vol. I, 1900,
pp. xxiii, xxix. Cf. J. G. Mackay, More West Highland
Tales, 1940, General Preface : " The poorest classes

39

The Bugbear of Literacy

generally speak the language admirably. . . . Some
recited thousands of lines of ancient heroic poems. . . .
Another cause of the fragmentary character of some tales
is the obliterating effect of modern civilization " ; and J.
Watson, ibid., Introduction : " This intellectual inheritance
. . . this ancient culture extended over all the north and
northerly midlands of Scotland. The people who possessed
this culture may have been, and usually were, unlettered.
They were far from being uneducated. It is sad to think
that its decay has been partly due to the schools and the
Church ! " It is, in fact, precisely by " the schools and the
Church " that the decay of cultures all over the world has
been hastened in the last hundred years.

H. J. Massingham in This Plot of Earth (1944, p. 233) tells
of " the old man, Seonardh Coinbeul, who could neither
read nor write and carried 4500 lines of his own bardic
composition in his head, together with all manner of songs
and stories."

A. Solonylsin in the Asiatic Review (NS. XLI, Jan., 1945,
p. 86) remarks that the recording of the Kirghiz epic is still
incomplete, although over 1,100,000 lines have already been
taken down by the Kirghiz Research Institute " Bards
who recite the ' Manasr or ' Manaschi ' have pheno-
menal memories in addition to poetic talent. Only this can
explain the fact that hundreds of thousands of verses have
been handed down orally." A writer reviewing Manas,
Kirghiski Narodni Epos in the Journal of American Folklore,
58, 1945, p. 65, observes that " general education has
already done much to remove the raison d'etre of the
minstrel's position in tribal life. . . . With acculturation
becoming a rolling Juggernaut it is not surprising that what
remains of epic singing may soon degenerate into an artificial
and ostentatiously national publicity device."

R. St. Barbe Baker, Africa Drums, 1942, p. 145.

10 W. G. Archer, The Blue Grove, 1940, Preface ; and in
JBORS, Vol. XXIX, p. 68.

11 Edward Schroder Prior and Arthur Gardner, An
Account of Medieval Figure-Sculpture in England, 1912, p.

25-

40

The Bugbear of Literacy

12 Paul Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher, 1927.
18 J. Strzygowski, Spuren indogermanische Glaubens in
der bildenden Kunst, 1936, p. 344.

14 Tom Hanisson, Savage Civilisation, 1937, pp. 45, 344,

35i> 353-

15 Plato, Phaedrus, 275 f. Cf. H. Gauss, Plato's Concep-
tion of Philosophy, 1937, pp. 262-5.

" Most of us to-day can hardly credit the achievement of
the illiterati who knew the Koran by heart or carried the
entire Iliad or Odyssey in their minds. But nowadays who-
ever trusts his library and notebooks may no longer trust
his remembrance. . . . Among wholly illiterate (but not
therefore uncivilized) races there may flourish fully
organized literatures of unrestricted range and high
artistic merit " (Rhys Carpenter, Folk Tale, Fiction and
Saga in the Homeric Epics, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1946,

P- 3).
18 Sir George A. Grierson, Lalla Vakyani, 1920, p. 3.

17 Albert Schweitzer, On the Edge of the Primeval Forest.

18 De reductione artium ad theologiam, 14.

19 N. K. Chadwick, Poetry and Prophecy, 1942, Preface,
further, " The experience of exclusively literate com-
munities is too narrow." " Ever learning, and never able
to come to the knowledge of the truth" (2 Timothy iii. 7) !

20 Modern " education " imposed upon traditional
cultures (e.g. Gaelic, Indian, Polynesian, American Indian)
is only less deliberately, not less actually, destructive than
the Nazi destruction of Polish libraries, which was intended
to wipe out their racial memories ; the Germans acted
consciously, but those who Anglicize or Americanize or
Frenchify are driven by a rancour that they do not recog-
nize and could not confess. This rancour is, in fact, their
reaction to a superiority that they resent and therefore
would like to destroy.

Ill : Paths That Lead to the Same Summit

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON COMPARATIVE RELIGION

There is no Natural Religion As all men are alike
(though infinitely various), so all Religions, as all
similars, have one source. William Blake.

There is but one salvation for all mankind, and that is
the life of God in the soul. William Law.

THE constant increase of contacts between our-
selves, who for the purposes of the present essay may
be assumed to be Christians, and other peoples who
belong to the great non-Christian majority has made it
more than ever before an urgent necessity for us to
understand the faiths by which they live. Such an
understanding is at the same time intrinsically to be
desired, and indispensable for the solution by agree-
ment of the economic and political problems by which
the peoples of the world are at present more divided
than united. We cannot establish human relationships
with other peoples if we are convinced of our own
superiority or superior wisdom, and only want to con-
vert them to our way of thinking. The modern
Christian, who thinks of the world as his parish, is
faced with the painful necessity of becoming himself a
citizen of the world ; he is invited to participate in a
symposium and a convivium ; not to preside for
there is Another who presides unseen but as one of
many guests.

It is no longer only for the professed missionary that
a study of other religions than his own is required.

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Paths That Lead to the Same Summit

This very essay, for example, is based upon an address
given to a large group of schoolteachers in a series
entitled "How to Teach about Other Peoples,"
sponsored by the New York School Board and the East
and West Association. It has, too, been proposed
that in all the schools and universities of the post-
war world stress should be laid on the teaching of the
basic principles of the great world religions as a means of
promoting international understanding and develop-
ing a concept of world citizenship.

The question next arises, By whom can such teaching
be properly given ? It will be self-evident that no one
can have understood, and so be qualified to teach, a
religion, who is opposed to all religion ; this will rule
out the rationalist and scientific humanist, and ulti-
mately all those whose conception of religion is not
theological, but merely ethical. The obvious ideal
would be for the great religions to be taught only by
those who confess them ; but this is an ideal that could
only be realized, for the present, in our larger uni-
versities. It has been proposed to establish a school
of this kind at Oxford.

As things are, a teaching about other than Christian
faiths is mainly given in theological seminaries and,
missionary colleges by men who do believe that
Christianity is the only true faith, who approve of
foreign missions, and who wish to prepare the mission-
ary for his work. Under these conditions, the study of
comparative religion necessarily assumes a character
quite different from that of other disciplines ; it can-
not but be biased. It is obvious that if we are to teach
at all it should be our intention to communicate only
truth : but where a teaching takes for granted that the
subject matter to be dealt with is intrinsically of

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inferior significance, and the subject is taught, not con
amove, but only to instruct the future schoolmaster in
the problems that he will have to cope with, one can-
not but suspect that at least a part of the truth will be
suppressed, if not intentionally, at least unknowingly.

If comparative religion is to be taught as other
sciences are taught, the teacher must surely have
recognized that his own religion is only one of those
that are to be " compared " ; he may not expound
any " pet theories " of his own, but is to present the
truth without bias, to the extent that it lies in his
power. In other words, it will be " necessary to recog-
nize that those institutions which are based on the
same premises, let us say the supernatural, must be
considered together, our own amongst the rest/'
whereas " to-day, whether it is a question of imperial-
ism, or of race prejudice, or of a comparison between
Christianity and paganism, we are still preoccupied
with the uniqueness ... of our own institutions and
achievements, our own civilization." 1 One cannot
but ask whether the Christian whose conviction is
ineradicable that his is the only true faith can con-
scientiously permit himself to expound another religion,
knowing that he cannot do so honestly.

How completely pragmatic the missionary point of
view can be is illustrated by the comment of one who
after spending over thirty years in India could speak
of " the presence in the country of six million profes-
sional beggars, most of them ' holy men ' who are
entirely unproductive." (L. W. Bryce, India at the
Threshold, New York, 1946, p. 113). Shades of St.
Francis d'Assisi !

We are, then, in proposing to teach about other

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peoples, faced with the problem of tolerance. The
word is not a pretty one ; to tolerate is to put up with,
endure, or suffer the existence of what are or appear
to be other ways of thinking than our own ; and it is
neither very pleasant merely " to put up with " our
neighbours and fellow guests, not very pleasant to
feel that one's own deepest institutions and beliefs are
being patiently " endured." Moreover, if the Western
world is actually more tolerant to-day than it was some
centuries ago, or has been since the fall of Rome, it is
largely because men are no longer sure that there is any
truth of which we can be certain, and are inclined to the
" democratic " belief that one man's opinion is as good
as another's, especially in the fields of politics, art, and
religion. Tolerance, then, is a merely negative virtue,
demanding no sacrifice of spiritual pride and involving
no abrogation of our sense of superiority ; it can be
commended only in so far as it means that we shall
refrain from hating or persecuting others who differ
or seem to differ from ourselves in habit or belief.
Tolerance still allows us to pity those who differ from
ourselves, and are consequently to be pitied !

Tolerance, carried further, implies indifference, and
becomes intolerable. Our proposal is not that we
should tolerate heresies, but rather come to some agree-
ment about the truth. Our proposition is that the
proper objective of an education in comparative religion
should be to enable the pupil to discuss with other
believers the validity of particular doctrines, 2 , leaving
the problem of the truth or falsity, superiority or
inferiority, of whole bodies of doctrine in abeyance
until we have had at least an opportunity to know in
what respects they really differ from one another, and
whether in essentials or in accidentals. We take it

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The

for granted, of cour* se> that they wiu i nev i tably differ

accidentaUy, sincW "nothing can be known except

in the mode of ta^ e knower." One must at least have

been taught ^<j. o recognize equivalent symbols, e.g.,

rose and loi J us (R osa Mundi and Padmavati) ; that

Soma is t>e " bread and water of life " ; or that the

Maker $f ail things is by no means accidentally, but

neces^farily a " carpenter " wherever the material of

whifih the world is made is hylic. The proposed

objective has this further and inmediate advantage,

JiSiat it is not in conflict with even the most rigid

'Christian orthodoxy; it has never been denied that

some truths are embodied in the pagan beliefs, and even

St. Thomas Aquinas was ready and willing to find in

the works of the pagan philosophers " extrinsic and

probable proofs " of the truths of Christianity. He

was, indeed, acquainted only with the ancients and

with the Jews and some Arabians ; but there is no

reason why the modern Christian, if his mental equip-

ment is adequate, should not learn to recognize or

be delighted to find in, let us say, Vedantic, Sufi,

Taoist, or American Indian formulations extrinsic

and probable proofs of the truth as he knows it. It

is more than probable, indeed, that his contacts with

other believers will be of very great advantage to the

Christian student in his exegesis and understanding of

Christian doctrine ; for though himself a believer, this is

in spite of the nominalist intellectual environment in

which he was born and bred, and by which he cannot

but be to some degree affected ; while the Oriental

(to whom the miracles attributed to Christ present

no problem) is still a realist, born and bred in a realistic

environment, and is therefore in a position to approach

Plato or St. John, Dante or Meister Eckhart more

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simply and directly than the Western scholar who can-
not but have been affected to some extent by the
doubts and difficulties that force themselves upon
those whose education and environment have been for
the greater part profane.

Such a procedure as we have suggested provides us
immediately with a basis for a common understanding
and for co-operation. What we have in view is an
ultimate " reunion of the churches " in a far wider
sense than that in which this expression is commonly
employed : the substitution of active alliances let
us say of Christianity and Hinduism or Islam, on the
basis of commonly recognized first principles, and with
a view to an effective co-operation in the application
of these principles to the contingent fields of art
(manufacture) and prudence for what is at present
nothing better than a civil war between the members
of one human family, children of one and the same God,
" whom," as Philo said, " with one accord all Greeks
and Barbarians acknowledge together." 8 It is with
reference to this statement that Professor Goodenough
remarks that, " So far as I can see Philo was telling the
simple truth about paganism as he saw it, not as
Christian propaganda has ever since misrepresented
it."

It need not be concealed that such alliances will
necessarily involve an abandonment of all missionary
enterprises such as they are now ; interdenominational
conferences will take the place of those proselytizing
expeditions of which the only permanent result is the
secularization and destruction of existing cultures and
the pulling up of individuals by their roots. You
have already reached the point in which culture and
religion, utility and meaning, have been divorced and

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can be considered apart, but this is not true of those
peoples whom you propose to convert, whose religion
and culture are one and the same thing and none of
the functions of whose life are necessarily profane or
unprincipled. If ever you should succeed in persuad-
ing the Hindus that their revealed scriptures are valid
only " as literature," you will have reduced them to the
level of your own college men who read the Bible, if at
all, only as literature. Christianity in India, as Sister
Nivedita (Patrick Geddes' distinguished pupil, and
author of The Web of Indian Life) once remarked,
" carries drunkenness in its wake " 4 for if you teach
a man that what he has thought right is wrong,
he will be apt to think that what he has thought
wrong is right.

We are all alike in need of repentance and conversion,
a " change of mind " and a " turning round " : not,
however, from one form of belief to another, but from
unbelief to belief. There can be no more vicious kind
of tolerance than to approach another man, to tell him
that " We are both serving the same God, you in your
way and I in His ! " The " compassing of sea and
land to make one proselyte " can be carried on as an
institution only for so long as our ignorance of other
peoples' faiths persists. The subsidizing of educational
or medical services accessory to the primary purpose
of conversion is a form of simony and an infringe-
ment of the instruction, " Heal the sick . . . provide
neither gold nor silver nor brass in your purses, nor
scrip for your journey . . . [but go] forth as sheep in
the midst of wolves." Wherever you go, it must be
not as masters or superiors but as guests, or as we might
say nowadays, " exchange professors " ; you must not
return to betray the confidences of your hosts by any

Paths That Lead to the Same Summit

libel. Your vocation must be purged of any notion
of a " civilizing mission " ; for what you think of as
" the white man's burden " here is a matter of " white
shadows in the South Seas " there. Your " Christian "
civilization is ending in disaster and you are bold
enough to offer it to others ! Realize that, as Professor
Plumer has said, " the surest way to betray our
Chinese allies is to sell, give or lend-lease them our
[American] standard of living, 1 ' 5 and that the hardest
task you could undertake for the present and im-
mediate future is to convince the Orient that the
civilization of Europe is in any sense a Christian
civilization, or that there redly are reasonable, just,
and tolerable Europeans amongst the " barbarians "
of whom the Orient lives in terror.

The word " heresy " means choice, the having
opinions of one's own, and thinking what we like to
think : we can only grasp its real meaning to-day,
when " thinking for oneself " is so highly recom-
mended (with the proviso that the thinking must be
" 100 per cent."), if we realize that the modern equiva-
lent of heresy is " treason." The one outstanding,
and perhaps the only, real heresy of modern Christianity
in the eyes of other believers is its claim to exclusive
truth ; for this is treason against Him who " never
left himself without a witness," and can only be
paralleled by Peter's denial of Christ ; and whoever
says to his pagan friends that " the light that is in you
is darkness," in offending these is offending the Father
of lights. In view of St. Ambrose's well-known
gloss on i Corinthians xii. 3, "all that is true, by
whomsoever it has been said, is from the Holy Ghost "
(a dictum endorsed by St. Thomas Aquinas), you may
be asked, " On what grounds do you propose to

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distinguish between your own ' revealed ' religion and
our ' natural ' religion, for which, in fact, we also claim
a supernatural origin ? " You may find this question
hard to answer.

The claim to an exclusive validity is by no means
calculated to make for the survival of Christianity in a
world prepared to prove all things. On the con-
trary, it may weaken enormously its prestige in relation
to other traditions in which a very different attitude
prevails, and which are under no necessity of engaging
in any polemic. As a great German theologian has
said, " human culture [Menschheitsbildung] is a unitary
whole, and its separate cultures are the dialects of one
and the same language of the spirit." 6 The quarrel
of Christianity with other religions seems to an Oriental
as much a tactical error in the conflict of ideal with
sensate motivations as it would have been for the
Allies to turn against the Chinese on the battlefield.
Nor will he participate in such a quarrel ; much
rather he will say, what I have often said to Christian
friends, " Even if you are not on our side, we are on
yours." 7 The converse attitude is rarely expressed ;
but twice in my life I have met a Roman Catholic
who could freely admit that for a Hindu to become a
professing Christian was not essential to salvation.
Yet, could we believe it, the Truth or Justice with
which we are all alike and unconditionally concerned
is like the Round Table to which " al the worlde crysten
and hethen repayren " to eat of one and the same bread
and drink the same wine, and at which " all are equal,
the high and the low." I do know also of one European
Trappist monk, whose brother is a Moslem ; both are
men of prayer ; neither has any wish to convert the
other. A very learned Roman Catholic friend of mine

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in correspondence, speaks of Sri Ramakrishna as
" another Christ . . . Christ's own self."

Let us now, for a moment, consider the points of
view that have been expressed by the ancients and
other non-Christians when they speak of religions other
than their own. We have already quoted Philo.
Plutarch, first with bitter irony disposing of the Greek
euhemerists " who spread atheism all over the world
by obliterating the Gods of our belief and turning them
all alike into the names of generals, admirals and
kings," and of the Greeks who could no longer dis-
tinguish Apollo (the intelligible Sun) from Helios (the
sensible sun), goes on to say : " Nor do we speak of the
' different Gods ' of different peoples, or of the Gods
as ' Barbarian ' and ' Greek,' but as common to all,
though differently named by different peoples, so that
for the One Reason (Logos) that orders all these things,
and the One Providence that oversees them, and for
the minor powers [i.e., gods, angels] that are appointed
to care for all things, there have arisen among different
peoples different epithets and services, according to
their different manners and customs." 8 Apuleius
recognizes that the Egyptian Isis (our Mother Nature
and Madonna, Natura Naturans, Creatric, Deus) " is
adored throughout the world in divers manners, in
variable customs and by many names." 9

The Musalman Emperor of India, Jahangur,
writing of his friend and teacher, the Hindu
hermit Jadrup, says that "his Vedanta is the
same as our Taawwuf " : in the same way
Prince Muhiammad Dara Shikuh (through whose
Persian version the Upanishads first reached Europe)
in his Mingling of the Two Oceans (of Islam and

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Hinduism) finds, as regards their enunciation of Truth,
" only verbal differences " between the Sufis and the
" Indian monotheists " ; and, in fact, Northern
India abounds in a type of religious literature in which
it is often difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish
Musalman from Hindu factors. 10 The indifference of
religious forms is indeed, as Professor Nicholson
remarks, " a cardinal Sufi doctrine." So we find
ibn-ul-'Arabi saying :

My heart is capable of every form : it is a pasture for

gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,
And idol-temple and the pilgrim's Ka'ba [Mecca], and

the tables of the Torah and the book of the Koran ;
I follow the religion of Love, whichever way his

camels take ; my religion and my faith is the true

religion. 11

That is to say that you and I, whose religions are
distinguishable, can each of us say that " mine is the
true religion," and to one another that " yours is the
true religion " whether or not either or both of us be
truly religious depending not upon the form of our
religion but upon ourselves and on grace. So, too,
Shams-i-Tabriz :

If the notion of my Beloved is to be found in an idol-
temple,

Twere mortal sin to circumscribe the Ka'ba !

The Ka'ba is but a church if there His trace be lost :

My Ka'ba is whatever " church " in which His trace
is found ! 12

Similarly in Hinduism ; the Tamil poet-saint
Tayumanavar, for example, says in a hymn to Siva :

Paths That Lead to the Same Summit

Thou didst fittingly . . . inspire as Teacher millions
of religions.

Thou didst in each religion, while it like the rest
showed in splendid fulness of treatises, disputa-
tions, sciences, [make] each its tenet to be the
truth, the final goal. 18

The Bhaktakalpadruma of Pratapa Siriiha maintains
that " every man should, as far as in him lieth, help
the reading of the Scriptures, whether those of his
own church or those of another." 14

In the Bhagavad Gita (VII, 21) Sri Krishna proclaims :
" If any lover whatsoever seeks with faith to worship
any form [of God] whatever, it is I who am the founder
of his faith/' and (IV, n), "However men approach
Me, even do I reward them, for the path men take
from every side is Mine." 15

We have the word of Christ himself that he came to
call not the just, but sinners (Matthew ix.i3). What
can we make out of that, but that, as St. Justin said,
" God is the Word of whom the whole human race are
partakers, and those who lived according to Reason
are Christians even though accounted atheists. . . .
Socrates and Heracleitus, and of the barbarians
Abraham and many others." So, too, Meister Eckhart,
greatest of the Christian mystics, speaks of Plato
(whom the Moslem Jill saw in a vision, "filling the
world with light ") as " that great priest," and as
having " found the way ere ever Christ was born."
Was St. Augustine wrong when he affirmed that " the
very thing that is now called the Christian religion
was not wanting amongst the ancients from the begin-
ning of the human race, until Christ came in the flesh,
after which the true religion, which already existed,

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began to be called ' Christian ' " ? Had he not re-
tracted these brave words, the bloodstained history of
Christianity might have been otherwise written !

We have come to think of religion more as a set of
rules of conduct than as a doctrine about God ; less
as a doctrine about what we should be, than one of what
we ought to do ; and because there is necessarily an
element of contingency in every application of
principles to particular cases, we have come to believe
that theory differs as practice must. This confusion
of necessary means with transcendent ends (as if the
vision of God could be earned by works) has had un-
fortunate results for Christianity, both at home and
abroad. The more the Church has devoted herself to
" social service," the more her influence has declined ;
an age that regards monasticism as an almost immoral
retreat is itself unarmed. It is mainly because religion
has been offered to modern men in nauseatingly
sentimental terms ("Be good, sweet child," etc.),
and no longer as an intellectual challenge, that so
many have been revolted, thinking that that " is all
there is to " religion. Such an emphasis on ethics
(and, incidentally, forgetfulness that Christian doc-
trine has as much to do with art, i.e. manufacture,
making, what and how, as it has to do with behaviour)
plays into the sceptic's hands ; for the desirability
and convenience of the social virtues is such and so
evident that it is felt that if that is all that religion
means, why bring in a God to sanction forms of conduct
of which no one denies the propriety ? Why indeed ? 16
At the same time this excessive emphasis upon the
moral, and neglect of the intellectual virtues (which
last alone, in orthodox Christian teaching, are held to
survive our dissolution) invite the retorts of the

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rationalists who maintain that religion has never been
anything but a means of drugging the lower classes and
keeping them quiet.

Against all that, the severe intellectual discipline
that any serious study of Eastern, or even " primitive,"
religion and philosophy demands can serve as a useful
corrective. The task of co-operation in the field of
comparative religion is one that demands the highest
possible qualifications ; if we cannot give our best to
the task, it would be safer not to undertake it. The
time is fast coming when it will be as necessary for the
man who is to be called " educated " to know either
Arabic, Sanskrit, or Chinese as it is now for him to
read Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. And this, above all,
in the case of those who are to teach about other
peoples' faiths ; for existing translations are often
in many different ways inadequate, and if we are to
know whether or not it is true that all believing men
have hitherto worshipped and still worship one and the
same God, whether by his English, Latin, Arabic,
Chinese, or Navajo names, one must have searched
the scriptures of the world never forgetting that
sine desiderio mens non intelligit.

Nor may we undertake these activities of instruction
with ulterior motives : as in all other educational
activities, so here the teacher's effort must be directed
to the interest and advantage of the pupil himself,
not that he may do good, but that he may be good.
The dictum that "charity begins at home" is by no
means necessarily a cynicism : it rather takes for
granted that to do good is only possible when we are
good, and that if we are good we shall do good, whether
by action or inaction, speech or silence. It is sound
Christian doctrine that a man must first have known

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and loved himself, his inner man, before he loves his
neighbour.

It is, then, the pupil who comes first in our concep-
tion of the teaching of comparative religion. He will
be astounded by the effect upon his understanding of
Christian doctrine that can be induced by the recogni-
tion of similar doctrines stated in another language and
by means of what are to him strange or even grotesque
figures of thought. In the following of the vestigia
pedis, the soul " in hot pursuit of her quarry, Christ,"
he will recognize an idiom of the language of the spirit
that has come down to us from the hunting cultures of
the Stone Age ; a cannibal philosophy in that of the
Eucharist and the Soma sacrifice ; and the doctrine of
the " seven rays " of the intelligible Sun in that of the
Seven Gifts of the Spirit and in the " seven eyes " of
the Apocalyptic Lamb and of Cuchulainn. He may
find himself far less inclined than he is now to recoil
from Christ's harder sayings, or those of St. Paul on the
" sundering of soul from spirit." If he balks at the
command to hate, not merely his earthly relatives,
but, " yea, and his own soul also," and prefers the
milder wording of the Authorized Version, where " life "
replaces " soul," or if he would like to interpret in a
merely ethical sense the command to " deny himself,"
although the word that is rendered by " deny " means
" utterly reject " ; if he now begins to realize that the
" soul " is of the dust that returns to the dust when the
spirit returns to God who gave it, and that equally for
Hebrew and Arabic theologians this " soul " (nefesh,
nafs) imports that carnal " individuality " of which
the Christian mystics are thinking when they say that
" the soul must put itself to death " ; or that our
existence (distinguishing esse from essentia,

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from oucrta, bhu from as) is a crime ; and if he cor-
relates all these ideas with the Islamic and Indian
exhortation to " die before you die " and with St.
Paul's " I live, yet not I," then he may be less inclined
to read into Christian doctrine any promise of eternal
life for any " soul " that has been concreated with the
body and better equipped to show that the spiritual-
ists' " proofs " of the survival of human personality,
however valid, have no religious bearings whatever.

The mind of the democratic student to whom the
very name of the concept of a " divine right " may be
unintelligible is likely to be roughly awakened if he ever
realizes that, as Professor Buckler often reminds us,
the very notion of a kingdom of God on earth " depends
for its revelation on the inner meaning of eastern
kingship," for he may have forgotten in his righteous
destestation of all dictatorships, that the classical
definition of " tyranny " is that of " a king ruling in his
own interests."

Nor is this a one-sided transaction ; it would not be
easy to exaggerate the alteration that can be brought
about in the Hindu's or Buddhist's estimate of
Christianity when the opportunity is given him to
come into closer contact with the quality of thought
that led Vincent of Beauvais to speak of Christ's
" ferocity " and Dante to marvel at " the multitude
of teeth with which this Love bites."

" Some contemplate one Name, and some another ?
Which of these is the best ? All are eminent clues to
the transcendent, immortal, unembodied Brahma :
these Names are to be contemplated, lauded, and at
last denied. For by them one rises higher and higher
in these worlds ; but where all comes to its end, there
he attains to the Unity of the Person " (Maitri

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Upanishatf). Whoever knows this text, but nothing of
Western technique, will assuredly be moved by a
sympathetic understanding when he learns that the
Christian also follows a via affirmativa and a via re-
motionis I Whoever has been taught a doctrine of
" liberation from the pairs of opposites " (past and
future, pleasure and pain, etc., the Symplegades of
"folklore'') will be stirred by Nicholas of Cusa's
description of the wall of Paradise wherein God dwells
as " built of contradictories," and by Dante's of what
lies beyond this wall as " not in space, nor hath it
poles," but "where every where and every when is
focused." We all need to realize, with Xenophon,
that " when God is our teacher, we come to think alike."
For there are as many of these Hindus and Buddhists
whose knowledge of Christianity and of the greatest
Christian writers is virtually nil, as there are Christians,
equally learned, whose real knowledge of any other
religion but their own is virtually nil, because they have
never imagined what it might be to live these other
faiths. Just as there can be no real knowledge of a
language if we have never even imaginatively par-
ticipated in the activities to which the language refers,
so there can be no real knowledge of any " life " that
one has not in some measure lived. The greatest of
modern Indian saints actually practised Christian and
Islamic disciplines, that is, worshipped Christ and
Allah, and found that all led to the same goal : he
could speak from experience of the equal validity of all
these "ways," and feel the same respect for each,
while still preferring for himself the one to which his
whole being was naturally attuned by nativity,
temperament, and training. What a loss it would
have been to his countrymen and to the world, and

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even to Christianity, if he had " become a Christian " !
There are many paths that lead to the summit of one
and the same mountain ; their differences will be the
more apparent the lower down we are, but they
vanish at the peak ; each will naturally take the
one that starts from the point at which he finds
himself ; he who goes round about the mountain
looking for another is not climbing. Never let us
approach another believer to ask him to become " one
of us" but approach him with respect as one who is
already " one of His" who is, and from whose invari-
able beauty all contingent being depends ! 17

REFERENCES

1 Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture, 1934, p. 5-

An illustration of Ruth Benedict's comment can be cited
from C. S. Lewis, Miracles, 1947, p. 140 : " Democrats by
birth and education, we should prefer to think that all
nations and individuals start level in the search for God, or
even that all religions are equally true. It must be admitted
at once that Christianity makes no concessions to this point
of view." What a trial for the poor Christian to have to
admit that he is right and that everybody else is wrong 1
Still, somehow or other, he manages to bear up under this
supposedly God-imposed burclen.

2 To illustrate what I mean by " discussion " here, I refer
the reader to my article entitled, " On Being in One's Right
Mind," in the Review of Religion, Vol. VII, New York, 1942,
pp. 32-40. Although in fact by one author, this article is in
effect a collaboration of Christian, Platonist, and Hindu,
expounding a doctrine held in common.

8 Philo Judaeus, De specialibus legibus II, 65 ; E. R.
Goodenough, Introduction to Philo Judaeus, 1940, pp. 105,
108.

4 Lambs among Wolves^igo^. See also my "Christian

" 59

The Bugbear of Literacy

Missions in India " in Essays in National Idealism (ist ed.,
1909 ; or 2nd ed.).

5 J. M. Plumer, " China's High Standard of Living/' Asia
and the Americas, February, 1944.

6 Alfred Jeremias, Altorientalische Geisteskultur, Vorwort.
" A long metaphysical chain runs throughout the world and
connects all races " (Johannes Sauter, in Archil) fur Rechts-
und Sozialphilosophie, Berlin, October, 1934).

7 Cf. D. S. Sarma : Hinduism " has out-lived the
Christian propaganda of modern times ... It is now able
to meet any of these world religions on equal terms as their
friend and ally in a common cause " (Renaissance of Hindu-
ism, 1944, p. 70, italics mine). What might not be
accomplished if Christians would but open their eyes !

8 Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, 67 (Moralia, 377). So William
Law, in continuation of the citation above, " There is not
one [salvation] for the Jew, another for the Christian, and a
third for the heathen. No, God is one, human nature is one,
and the way to it is one ; and that is, the desire of the soul
turned to God." Actually, this refers to " the baptism of
desire," or " of the Spirit " (as distinguished from baptism
by water, which involves an actual membership in the
Christian community) and only modifies the Christian
dogma extra Ecclesiam nulla solus. The real problem is that
of the proper meaning of the words " Catholic Church " ;
we say that this should mean not any one religion as such,
but the community, or universe of experience, of all those
who love God. As William Law says also : " The chief hurt
of a sect is this, that it takes itself to be necessary to the
truth, whereas the truth is only then found when it is known
to be of no sect but as free and universal as the goodness of
God and as common to all names and nations as the air and
light of this world."

Cf. F. W. Buckler : " The layman, Dissenter, schismatic
or the heathen, who wittingly or unwittingly has taken up
his Cross, is a child of the kingdom of God on earth and a
Khallfah of our Lord, as the priest or bishop, who has not
taken up his Cross, however unquestionable his Apostolic
continuity, is not " (The Epiphany of the Cross, 1938). It

60

Paths That Lead to the Same Summit

should also be borne in mind that (as the last mentioned
author has often shown) the Christian concept of the
" kingdom of God " cannot be properly understood except
in the light of the Oriental theory of Kingship and Divine
Right.

9 Apuleius, Golden Ass, XI, 5.

Cf. Alfred Jeremias, Der Kosmos von Sumer (Dev Alte
Orient, 32, Leipzig, 1932), Ch. Ill, " Die eine Madonna''

10 Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri (Memoirs of Jahangir), in the version
by Rogers and Beveridge, 1905, p. 356, M. Mahfuz-ul-Haq,
Majma'ul-Bahrein (translation, Bib. Ind. 246, Calcutta,
1929) ; V. Raghavan, " Dara Shikoh's Majma-ul-Bahrein,"
Journal of Oriental Research 15, 1947, 150-158.

11 R. A. Nicholson, Mystics of Islam, 1914, p. 105.
Similarly, " If he [the follower of any particular religion]
understood the saying of Junayd, ' The colour of the water
is the colour of the vessel containing it/ he would not
interfere with the beliefs of others, but would perceive God
in every form and in every belief " (ibn-ul-'Arabi, Nichol-
son, Studies in Islamic Mysticism, 1921, p. 159). And,
" Henceforth I knew that there were not many gods of
human worship, but one God only, who was polyonomous
and polymorphous, being figured and named according to
the variety of the outward condition of things " (Sir George
Birdwood, Sva, 1915, p. 28).

12 R. A. Nicholson, Diwanl Shams-i-Tabriz t 1898, p. 238,
cf. 221.

Cf. Faridu'd Dm 'Attar, in the Mantiqu't Tayr : " Since,
then, there are different ways of making the journey, no
two [soul-] birds will fly alike. Each finds a way of his own,
on this road of mystic knowledge, one by means of the
Mihrab, and another through the Idol."

18 Sir P. Arunachalam, Studies and Translations,
Colombo, 1937, p. 201.

14 Translation by Sir George Grierson, JRAS, 1908,

P- 347-

15 Schleiermacher rightly maintains (Reden t V) that the
multiplicity of religions is grounded in the nature of religion
itself, and necessary for its complete manifestation " Nur

61

The Bugbear of Literacy

in der Totalitdt oiler solcher moglichen Formen kann die ganze
Religion wirklich gegeben werden" But Schleiermacher
claims the highest position for Christianity on the grounds
of its freedom from exclusiveness !

Una veritas in variis signis varie resplendeat : and in the
words of Marsilio Ficino, " Perhaps, indeed, this kind of
variety, ordained by God himself, displays a certain
admirable adornment of the universe " (De Christiana
religione, c. 4).

Cf. also Ernest Cassirer's exposition of Pico della
Mirandola's " defence of the libertas credendi" in the
Journal of the History of Ideas, III, 335.

16 The answer can be given in the words of Christopher
Dawson : " For when once morality has been deprived of
its religious and metaphysical foundations, it inevitably
becomes subordinated to lower ends/ 1 As he also says, the
need for a restoration of the ethics of vocation has become
the central problem of society " vocation " being that
station of life to which it has pleased God to call us, and not
the " job " to which our own ambitions drive.

17 The following books are commended to the reader's
attention :

Sister Nivedita, Lambs among Wolves (1903) and The Web
of Indian Life (1904 or later editions).

Demetra Vaka, Haremlik (1911).

Paul Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher (1927).

Father W. Schmidt, The High Gods of North America
(1933) and Origin and Growth of Religion (2nd ed., 1935).

Lord Raglan, The Hero (1936).

Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means (1937) ; The Perennial
Philosophy (1945) ; Science, Liberty t and Peace (1946).

Ren6 Gu&ion, East and West (1941) ; Crisis of the Modern
World (1942) ; General Introduction to the Hindu Doctrines
(1946).

Marco Pallis, Peaks and Lamas (1941).

R. St. Barbe Baker, Africa Drums (1942).

Swami Nikhilananda, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
(1942).

N. K. Chadwick, Poetry and Prophecy (1942).

62

Paths That Lead to the Same Summit

A. K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism (1943)
The Religious Basis of the Forms of Indian Society (1946).
Sir P. Arunachalam, Studies and Translations (1937).
Sir George Birdwood, Sva (1915).
J. C. Archer, The Sikhs (1946).

IV : Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge

East and West, The Crisis of the Modern World, Intro-
duction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines, and Man and
His Becoming (Luzac, London, 1941-46) are the first
of a series in which the majority of Ren6 Gu&ion's
works already published in French will appear in
English. Another version of Man and His Becoming
had appeared earlier. 1 M. Ren6 Gu&ion is not an
" Orientalist " but what the Hindus would call a
" master/ 1 formerly resident in Paris, and now for
many years in Egypt, where his affiliations are Islamic.
His Introduction generate d I* etude des doctrines hindoues
appeared in 1921. 2 As a preliminary to his further
expositions of the traditional philosophy, sometimes
called the Philosophia Perennis (et Universalis must be
understood, for this " philosophy " has been the
common inheritance of all mankind without exception),
Gu^non cleared the ground of all possible misconcep-
tion in two large and rather tedious, but by no means
unnecessary, volumes, L'Erreur spirite (i.e. " Fallacy
of Spiritualism/' a work for which Bhagavad Gitd,
XVII, 4, " Men of darkness are they who make a cult
of the departed and of spirits/' might have served as a
motto), 3 and Le Theosophisme, histoire d'une pseudo-
religion.* These are followed by L'Homme et son
devenir selon le Vedanta and L'Esot&risme de Dante*
Le roi du monde, 9 St. Bernard, 1 Orient et Occident and
Autorite spirituelle et pouvoir temporel* Le symbolisme
de la croix* Les itats multiples de I'live and La m6ta-
physique orientale. 11 More recently M. Gunon has
published in mimeographed, and subsequently printed,

64

Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge

editions Le r&gne de la quantite et les signes des temps, 1 *
Les principes de calcul infinitesimal, 1 * Aperfus sur
^initiation, and La grande triade. 1 *

In the meantime important articles from Gu&ion's
pen appeared monthly in La Voile d'Isis, later Etudes
Traditionnelles, a journal of which the appearance was
interrupted by the war, but which has been continued
as from September-October, 1945. Etudes Tradition-
nelles is devoted to "La Tradition Perpetuelle et
Unanime, revtlee tant par les dogmes et les rites des
religions orthodoxes que par la langue universelle des
symboles initiatiques." Of articles that have appeared
elsewhere attention may be called to " L'Esoterisme
Islamique " in Cahiers de Sud (1935). Excerpts from
Gu&ion's writings, with some comment have appeared
in Triveni (1935) and in the Vi&vabharatl Quarterly
(1935, 1938). A work by L. de Gaigneron entitled
Vers la connaissance interdite is closely connected with
Guenon's ; it is presented in the form of a discussion
in which the Atman (Spiritus), Mentalte ("Reason,"
in the current, not the Platonic, sense), and a Roman
abbe take part ; the " forbidden knowledge " is that
of the gnosis which the modern Church and the rational-
ist alike reject, though for very different reasons the
former because it cannot tolerate a point of view which
considers Christianity only as one amongst other
orthodox religions and the latter because, as a great
Orientalist (Professor A. B. Keith) has remarked,
"-such knowledge as is not empirical is meaningless
to us and should not be described as knowledge " 16
an almost classical confession of the limitations of the
" scientific " position.

Gudnon's French is at once precise and limpid, and
inevitably loses in translation ; his subject matter is

65

The Bugbear of Literacy

of absorbing interest, at least to anyone who cares for
what Plato calls the really serious things. 17 Neverthe-
less it has often been found unpalatable ; partly for
reasons given below, but also for reasons that have
been stated, paradoxically enough, by a reviewer of
Blakney's Meister Eckhart in the Harvard Divinity
School Bulletin, 16 who says that "To an age which
believes in personality and personalism, the impersonal-
ity of mysticism is baffling ; and to an age which is
trying to quicken its insight into history the indifference
of the mystics to events in time is disconcerting."
As for history, Gu^non's " he who cannot escape from
the standpoint of temporal succession so as to see all
things in their simultaneity is incapable of the least
conception of the metaphysical order " 19 adequately
complements Jacob Behmen's designation of the
" history that was once brought to pass " as " merely
the (outward) form of Christianity." 20 For the
Hindu, the events of the Rgveda are nowever and
dateless, and the Krishna Lila " not an historical
event " ; and the reliance of Christianity upon sup-
posedly historical " facts " seems to be its greatest
weakness. The value of literary history for doxo-
graphy is very little, and it is for this reason that so
many orthodox Hindus have thought of Western
scholarship as a " crime " : their interest is not in
" what men have believed," but in the truth. A
further difficulty is presented by Gu&ion's uncom-
promising language : " Western civilization is an
anomaly, not to say a monstrosity." Of this a re-
viewer 21 has remarked that " such sweeping remarks
cannot be shared even by critics of Western achieve-
ments." I should have thought that now that its
denouement is before our eyes, the truth of such a

66

Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge

statement might have been recognized by every un-
prejudiced European ; at any rate Sir George Birdwood
in 1915 described modern Western civilization as
" secular, joyless, inane, and self -destructive " and
Professor La Piana has said that " what we call our
civilization is but a murderous machine with no
conscience and no ideals " 22 and might well have
said suicidal as well as murderous. It would be very
easy to cite innumerable criticisms of the same kind ;
Sir S. Radhakrishnan holds, for example, that
" civilization is not worth saving if it continues on its
present foundations," 23 and this it would be hard to
deny ; Professor A. N. Whitehead has spoken quite
as forcibly " There remains the show of civilization,
without any of its realities." 24

In any case, if we are to read Gudnon at all, we must
have outgrown the temporally provincial view that
has for so long and so complacently envisaged a con-
tinuous progress of humanity culminating in the
twentieth century and be willing at least to ask our-
selves whether there has not been rather a continued
decline, " from the stone age until now," as one of the
most learned men in the U.S.A. once put it to me. It
is not by " science " that we can be saved : "the
possession of the sciences as a whole, if it does not
include the best, will in some few cases aid but more
often harm the owner." 26 " We are obliged to admit
that our European culture is a culture of the mind and
senses only"; 26 "The prostitution of science may
lead to world catastrophe"; 27 "Our dignity and
our interests require that we shall be the directors and
not the victims of technical and scientific advance "; 28
" Few will deny that the twentieth century thus far
has brought us bitter disappointment." 29 "We are

67 F

The Bugbear of Literacy

of absorbing interest, at least to anyone who cares for
what Plato calls the really serious things. 17 Neverthe-
less it has often been found unpalatable ; partly for
reasons given below, but also for reasons that have
been stated, paradoxically enough, by a reviewer of
Blakney's Meister Eckhart in the Harvard Divinity
School Bulletin who says that " To an age which
believes in personality and personalism, the impersonal-
ity of mysticism is baffling ; and to an age which is
trying to quicken its insight into history the indifference
of the mystics to events in time is disconcerting."
As for history, Gudnon's " he who cannot escape from
the standpoint of temporal succession so as to see all
things in their simultaneity is incapable of the least
conception of the metaphysical order " lft adequately
complements Jacob Behmen's designation of the
" history that was once brought to pass " as " merely
the ( outward) form of Christianity." 20 For the
Hindu, the events of the Rgveda are nowever and
dateless, and the Krishna Lila " not an historical
event " ; and the reliance of Christianity upon sup-
posedly historical " facts " seems to be its greatest
weakness. The value of literary history for doxo-
graphy is very little, and it is for this reason that so
many orthodox Hindus have thought of Western
scholarship as a " crime " : their interest is not in
" what men have believed," but in the truth. A
further difficulty is presented by Gu&ion's uncom-
promising language : " Western civilization is an
anomaly, not to say a monstrosity." Of this a re-
viewer 21 has remarked that " such sweeping remarks
cannot be shared even by critics of Western achieve-
ments." I should have thought that now that its
denouement is before our eyes, the truth of such a

66

Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge

statement might have been recognized by every un-
prejudiced European ; at any rate Sir George Birdwood
in 1915 described modern Western civilization as
" secular, joyless, inane, and self-destructive " and
Professor La Piana has said that " what we call our
civilization is but a murderous machine with no
conscience and no ideals " 22 and might well have
said suicidal as well as murderous. It would be very
easy to cite innumerable criticisms of the same kind ;
Sir S. Radhakrishnan holds, for example, that
" civilization is not worth saving if it continues on its
present foundations," 23 and this it would be hard to
deny ; Professor A. N. Whitehead has spoken quite
as forcibly " There remains the show of civilization,
without any of its realities/' 24

In any case, if we are to read Gu&ion at all, we must
have outgrown the temporally provincial view that
has for so long and so complacently envisaged a con-
tinuous progress of humanity culminating in the
twentieth century and be willing at least to ask our-
selves whether there has not been rather a continued
decline, " from the stone age until now," as one of the
most learned men in the U.S.A. once put it to me. It
is not by " science " that we can be saved : " the
possession of the sciences as a whole, if it does not
include the best, will in some few cases aid but more
often harm the owner." 26 " We are obliged to admit
that our European culture is a culture of the mind and
senses only " ; 26 " The prostitution of science may
lead to world catastrophe"; 27 "Our dignity and
our interests require that we shall be the directors and
not the victims of technical and scientific advance "; M
" Few will deny that the twentieth century thus far
has brought us bitter disappointment." 29 "We are

67 F

The Bugbear of Literacy

of absorbing interest, at least to anyone who cares for
what Plato calls the really serious things. 17 Neverthe-
less it has often been found unpalatable ; partly for
reasons given below, but also for reasons that have
been stated, paradoxically enough, by a reviewer of
Blakney's Meister Eckhart in the Harvard Divinity
School Bulletin, 1 * who says that " To an age which
believes in personality and personalism, the impersonal-
ity of mysticism is baffling ; and to an age which is
trying to quicken its insight into history the indifference
of the mystics to events in time is disconcerting."
As for history, Guenon's " he who cannot escape from
the standpoint of temporal succession so as to see all
things in their simultaneity is incapable of the least
conception of the metaphysical order " lft adequately
complements Jacob Behmen's designation of the
" history that was once brought to pass " as " merely
the (outward) form of Christianity." 20 For the
Hindu, the events of the Rgveda are nowever and
dateless, and the Krishna Lila " not an historical
event " ; and the reliance of Christianity upon sup-
posedly historical " facts " seems to be its greatest
weakness. The value of literary history for doxo-
graphy is very little, and it is for this reason that so
many orthodox Hindus have thought of Western
scholarship as a " crime " : their interest is not in
" what men have believed," but in the truth. A
further difficulty is presented by Gu&ion's uncom-
promising language : " Western civilization is an
anomaly, not to say a monstrosity." Of this a re-
viewer 21 has remarked that " such sweeping remarks
cannot be shared even by critics of Western achieve-
ments." I should have thought that now that its
denouement is before our eyes, the truth of such a

66

Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge

statement might have been recognized by every un-
prejudiced European ; at any rate Sir George Birdwood
in 1915 described modern Western civilization as
" secular, joyless, inane, and self -destructive " and
Professor La Piana has said that " what we call our
civilization is but a murderous machine with no
conscience and no ideals " 22 and might well have
said suicidal as well as murderous. It would be very
easy to cite innumerable criticisms of the same kind ;
Sir S. Radhakrishnan holds, for example, that
" civilization is not worth saving if it continues on its
present foundations," 23 and this it would be hard to
deny ; Professor A. N. Whitehead has spoken quite
as forcibly " There remains the show of civilization,
without any of its realities." 24

In any case, if we are to read Gu6non at all, we must
have outgrown the temporally provincial view that
has for so long and so complacently envisaged a con-
tinuous progress of humanity culminating in the
twentieth century and be willing at least to ask our-
selves whether there has not been rather a continued
decline, " from the stone age until now," as one of the
most learned men in the U.S.A. once put it to me. It
is not by " science " that we can be saved : " the
possession of the sciences as a whole, if it does not
include the best, will in some few cases aid but more
often harm the owner." 26 " We are obliged to admit
that our European culture is a culture of the mind and
senses only " ; 28 " The prostitution of science may
lead to world catastrophe"; 27 "Our dignity and
our interests require that we shall be the directors and
not the victims of technical and scientific advance "; M
" Few will deny that the twentieth century thus far
has brought us bitter disappointment." 29 "We are

67 F

The Bugbear of Literacy

of absorbing interest, at least to anyone who cares for
what Plato calls the really serious things. 17 Neverthe-
less it has often been found unpalatable ; partly for
reasons given below, but also for reasons that have
been stated, paradoxically enough, by a reviewer of
Blakney's Meister Eckhart in the Harvard Divinity
School Bulletin, who says that " To an age which
believes in personality and personalism, the impersonal-
ity of mysticism is baffling ; and to an age which is
trying to quicken its insight into history the indifference
of the mystics to events in time is disconcerting."
As for history, Guenon's " he who cannot escape from
the standpoint of temporal succession so as to see all
things in their simultaneity is incapable of the least
conception of the metaphysical order " 19 adequately
complements Jacob Behmen's designation of the
" history that was once brought to pass " as " merely
the ( outward) form of Christianity. 1 ' 20 For the
Hindu, the events of the Rgveda are nowever and
dateless, and the Krishna Lila " not an historical
event " ; and the reliance of Christianity upon sup-
posedly historical " facts " seems to be its greatest
weakness. The value of literary history for doxo-
graphy is very little, and it is for this reason that so
many orthodox Hindus have thought of Western
scholarship as a " crime " : their interest is not in
"what men have believed," but in the truth. A
further difficulty is presented by Gu&ion's uncom-
promising language : " Western civilization is an
anomaly, not to say a monstrosity." Of this a re-
viewer 21 has remarked that " such sweeping remarks
cannot be shared even by critics of Western achieve-
ments." I should have thought that now that its
denouement is before our eyes, the truth of such a

66

Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge

statement might have been recognized by every un-
prejudiced European ; at any rate Sir George Birdwood
in 1915 described modern Western civilization as
" secular, joyless, inane, and self -destructive " and
Professor La Piana has said that " what we call our
civilization is but a murderous machine with no
conscience and no ideals" 22 and might well have
said suicidal as well as murderous. It would be very
easy to cite innumerable criticisms of the same kind ;
Sir S. Radhakrishnan holds, for example, that
" civilization is not worth saving if it continues on its
present foundations/' 23 and this it would be hard to
deny ; Professor A, N. Whitehead has spoken quite
as forcibly " There remains the show of civilization,
without any of its realities." 24

In any case, if we are to read Guenon at all, we must
have outgrown the temporally provincial view that
has for so long and so complacently envisaged a con-
tinuous progress of humanity culminating in the
twentieth century and be willing at least to ask our-
selves whether there has not been rather a continued
decline, " from the stone age until now," as one of the
most learned men in the U.S.A. once put it to me. It
is not by "science" that we can be saved: "the
possession of the sciences as a whole, if it does not
include the best, will in some few cases aid but more
often harm the owner." 25 " We are obliged to admit
that our European culture is a culture of the mind and
senses only " ; 26 " The prostitution of science may
lead to world catastrophe"; 27 "Our dignity and
our interests require that we shall be the directors and
not the victims of technical and scientific advance "; 28
" Few will deny that the twentieth century thus far
has brought us bitter disappointment." 29 "We are

67 F

The Bugbear of Literacy

of absorbing interest, at least to anyone who cares for
what Plato calls the really serious things. 17 Neverthe-
less it has often been found unpalatable ; partly for
reasons given below, but also for reasons that have
been stated, paradoxically enough, by a reviewer of
Blakney's Meister Eckhart in the Harvard Divinity
School Bulletin who says that "To an age which
believes in personality and personalism, the impersonal-
ity of mysticism is baffling ; and to an age which is
trying to quicken its insight into history the indifference
of the mystics to events in time is disconcerting/ 1
As for history, Guenon's " he who cannot escape from
the standpoint of temporal succession so as to see all
things in their simultaneity is incapable of the least
conception of the metaphysical order " lft adequately
complements Jacob Behmen's designation of the
" history that was once brought to pass " as " merely
the ( outward) form of Christianity." 20 For the
Hindu, the events of the Rgveda are nowever and
dateless, and the Krishna Lila " not an historical
event " ; and the reliance of Christianity upon sup-
posedly historical " facts " seems to be its greatest
weakness. The value of literary history for doxo-
graphy is very little, and it is for this reason that so
many orthodox Hindus have thought of Western
scholarship as a " crime " : their interest is not in
" what men have believed," but in the truth. A
further difficulty is presented by Gu&ion's uncom-
promising language : " Western civilization is an
anomaly, not to say a monstrosity." Of this a re-
viewer 21 has remarked that " such sweeping remarks
cannot be shared even by critics of Western achieve-
ments." I should have thought that now that its
denouement is before our eyes, the truth of such a

66

Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge

statement might have been recognized by every un-
prejudiced European ; at any rate Sir George Birdwood
in 1915 described modern Western civilization as
" secular, joyless, inane, and self-destructive " and
Professor La Piana has said that " what we call our
civilization is but a murderous machine with no
conscience and no ideals " 22 and might well have
said suicidal as well as murderous. It would be very
easy to cite innumerable criticisms of the same kind ;
Sir S. Radhakrishnan holds, for example, that
" civilization is not worth saving if it continues on its
present foundations," 23 and this it would be hard to
deny ; Professor A. N. Whitehead has spoken quite
as forcibly " There remains the show of civilization,
without any of its realities/' 24

In any case, if we are to read Gu&ion at all, we must
have outgrown the temporally provincial view that
has for so long and so complacently envisaged a con-
tinuous progress of humanity culminating in the
twentieth century and be willing at least to ask our-
selves whether there has not been rather a continued
decline, " from the stone age until now," as one of the
most learned men in the U.S.A. once put it to me. It
is not by " science " that we can be saved : " the
possession of the sciences as a whole, if it does not
include the best, will in some few cases aid but more
often harm the owner." 26 " We are obliged to admit
that our European culture is a culture of the mind and
senses only"; 26 "The prostitution of science may
lead to world catastrophe"; 27 "Our dignity and
our interests require that we shall be the directors and
not the victims of technical and scientific advance "; 28
" Few will deny that the twentieth century thus far
has brought us bitter disappointment." 29 "We are

67 F

The Bugbear of Literacy

now faced with the prospect of complete bankruptcy
in every department of life." 30 Eric Gill speaks of the
" monstrous inhumanity " of industrialism, and of the
modern way of life, as " neither human nor normal nor
Christian. ... It is our way of thinking that is odd
and unnatural/' 31 This sense of frustration is perhaps
the most encouraging sign of the times. We have laid
stress on these things because it is only to those who
feel this frustration, and not to those who still believe
in progress, that Guenon addresses himself ; to those
who are complacent everything that he has to say will
seem to be preposterous.

The reactions of Roman Catholics to Guenon are
illuminating. One has pointed out that he is a " serious
metaphysician," i.e. one convinced of the truth he
expounds and eager to show the unanimity of the
Eastern and scholastic traditions, and observes that
" in such matters belief and understanding must go
together." 32 Crede ut intelligas is a piece of advice
that modern scholars would, indeed, do well to con-
sider ; it is, perhaps, just because we have not believed
that we have not yet understood the East. The same
author writes of East and West, " Ren Guenon is one
of the few writers of our time whose work is really of
importance ... he stands for the primacy of pure
metaphysics over all other forms of knowledge, and
presents himself as the exponent of a major tradition
of thought, predominantly Eastern, but shared in the
Middle Ages by the scholastics of the West . . . clearly
Gu&ion's position is not that of Christian orthodoxy,
but many, perhaps most, of his theses are, in fact,
better in accord with authentic Thomist doctrine than
are many opinions of devout but ill-instructed
Christians." 83 We should do well to remember that

68

Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge

even St. Thomas Aquinas did not disdain to make use
of " intrinsic and probable proofs " derived from the
" pagan " philosophers.

Gerald Vann, on the other hand, makes the mistake
which the title of his review, " Ren Guenon's Oriental-
ism," 34 announces; for this is not another "ism/ 1
nor a geographical antithesis, but one of modern
empiricism and traditional theory. Vann springs to
the defence of the very Christianity in which Guenon
himself sees almost the only possibility of salvation
for the West ; only possibility, not because there is
no other body of truth, but because the mentality of the
West is adapted to and needs a religion of just this
sort. But if Christianity should fail, it is just because
its intellectual aspects have been submerged, and it
has become a code of ethics rather than a doctrine
from which all other applications can and should be
derived ; hardly two consecutive sentences of some of
Meister Eckhart's sermons would be intelligible to an
average modern congregation, which does not expect
doctrine, and only expects to be told how to behave.
If Guenon wants the West to turn to Eastern meta-
physics, it is not because they are Eastern but because
this is metaphysics. If " Eastern " metaphysics
differed from a "Western" metaphysics as true
philosophy differs from what is often so called in our
modern universities one or the other would not be
metaphysics. It is from metaphysics that the West
has turned away in its desperate endeavour to live by
bread alone, an endeavour of which the Dead Sea
fruits are before our eyes. It is only because this
metaphysics still survives as a living power in Eastern
societies, in so far as they have not been corrupted by
the withering touch of Western, or rather, modern

69

The Bugbear of Literacy

civilization (for the contrast is not of East or West as
such, but of " those paths that the rest of mankind
follows as a matter of course " with those post-
Renaissance paths that have brought us to our present
impasse), and not to Orientalize the West, but to bring
back the West to a consciousness of the roots of her
own life and of values that have been transvalued in the
most sinister sense, that Gu&ion asks us to turn to the
East. He does not mean, and makes it very clear that
he does not mean, that Europeans ought to become
Hindus or Buddhists, but much rather that they, who
are getting nowhere by the study of " the Bible as
literature," or that of Dante " as a poet," should
rediscover Christianity, or what amounts to the same
thing, Plato (" that great priest," as Meister Eckhart
calls him). I often marvel at men's immunity to the
Apology and Phaedo or the seventh chapter of the
Republic ; I suppose it is because they would not hear,
" though one rose from the dead."

The issue of " East and West " is not merely a
theoretical (we must remind the modern reader that
from the standpoint of the traditional philosophy,
" theoretical " is anything but a term of disparagement)
but also an urgent practical problem. Pearl Buck
asks, "Why should prejudices be so strong at this
moment ? The answer it seems to me is simple.
Physical conveyance and other circumstances have
forced parts of the world once remote from each other
into actual intimacy for which peoples are not mentally
or spiritually prepared. ... It is not necessary to
believe that this initial stage must continue. If
those prepared to act as interpreters will do their
proper work, we may find that within another genera-
tion or two, or even sooner, dislike and prejudice may

70

Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge

be gone. This is only possible if prompt and strong
measures are taken by peoples to keep step mentally
with the increasing closeness to which the war is com-
pelling us." 35 But if this is to happen, the West will
have to abandon what Guenon calls its " proselytizing
fury," an expression that must not be taken to refer
only to the activities of Christian missionaries, re-
grettable as these often are, but to those of all the
distributors of modern " civilization " and those of
practically all those " educators " who feel that they
have more to give than to learn from what are often
called the " backward " or " unprogressive " peoples ;
to whom it does not occur that one may not wish or
need to " progress " if one has reached a state of
equilibrium that already provides for the realization
of what one regards as the greatest purposes of life.
It is an expression of good will and of the best intentions
that this proselytizing fury takes on its most dangerous
aspects. To many this " fury " can only suggest the
fable of the fox that lost its tail, and persuaded the
other foxes to cut off theirs. An industrialization of
the East may be inevitable, but do not let us call it a
blessing that a folk should be reduced to the level of a
proletariat, or assume that materially higher standards
of living necessarily make for greater happiness. The
West is only just discovering, to its great astonish-
ment, that " material inducements, that is, money or
the things that money can buy " are by no means so
cogent a force as has been supposed ; " Beyond the
subsistence level, the theory that this incentive is
decisive is largely an illusion." 86 As for the East, as
Guenon says, " The only impression that, for example,
mechanical inventions make on most Orientals is one
of deep repulsion ; certainly it all seems to them far

The Bugbear of Literacy

more harmful than beneficial, and if they find them-
selves obliged to accept certain things which the present
epoch has made necessary, they do so in the hope of
future riddance . . . what the people of the West
call ' rising ' would be called by some ' sinking ' ;
that is what all true Orientals think/ 137 It must not
be supposed that because so iftany Eastern peoples
have imitated us in self-defence that they have there-
fore accepted our values ; on the contrary, it is just
because the conservative East still challenges all the
presuppositions on which our illusion of progress
rests, that it deserves our most serious consideration.

There is nothing in economic intimacies that is likely
to reduce prejudice or promote mutual understandings
automatically. Even when Europeans live amongst
Orientals, " economic contact between the Eastern and
Western groups is practically the only contact there is.
There is very little social or religious give and take
between the two. Each lives in a world almost entirely
closed to the other and by ' closed ' we mean not
only ' unknown ' but more : incomprehensible and
unattainable." 38 That is an inhuman relationship,
by which both parties are degraded.

Neither must it be assumed that the Orient thinks it
important that the masses should learn to read and
write. Literacy is a practical necessity in an industrial
society, where the keeping of accounts is all important.
But in India, in so far as Western methods of education
have not been imposed from without, all higher educa-
tion is imparted orally, and to have heard is far more
important than to have read. At the same time the
peasant, prevented by his illiteracy and poverty from
devouring the newspapers and magazines that form the
daily and almost the only reading of the vast majority

72

Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge

of Western "literates/' is, like Hesiod's Boeotian
farmers, and still more like the Gaelic-speaking High-
landers before the era of the board schools, thoroughly
familiar with an epic literature of profound spiritual
significance and a body of poetry and music of in-
calculable value ; and one can only regret the spread
of an " education " that involves the destruction of all
these things, or only preserves them as curiosities
within the covers of books. For cultural purposes it is
not important that the masses should be literate ; it
is not necessary that anyone should be literate ; it is
only necessary that there should be amongst the people
philosophers (in the traditional, not the modern sense
of the word), and that there should be preserved deep
respect on the part of laymen for true learning that is
the antithesis of the American attitude to a " pro-
fessor." In these respects the whole East is still far
in advance of the West, and hence the learning of the
elite exerts a far profounder influence upon society as a
whole than the Western specialist " thinker " can ever
hope to wield.

It is not, however, primarily with a protection of the
East against the subversive inroads of Western " cul-
ture " that Guenon is concerned, but rather with the
question, What possibility of regeneration, if any, can
be envisaged for the West ? The possibility exists
only in the event of a return to first principles and to
the normal ways of living that proceed from the
application of first piinciples to contingent circum-
stances ; and as it is only in the East that these things
are still alive, it is to the East that the West must
turn. " It is the West that must take the initiative,
but she must be prepared really to go towards the East,
not merely seeking to draw the East towards herself,

73

The Bugbear of Literacy

more harmful than beneficial, and if they find them-
selves obliged to accept certain things which the present
epoch has made necessary, they do so in the hope of
future riddance . . . what the people of the West
call ' rising ' would be called by some ' sinking ' ;
that is what all true Orientals think." 37 It must not
be supposed that because so rflany Eastern peoples
have imitated us in self-defence that they have there-
fore accepted our values ; on the contrary, it is just
because the conservative East still challenges all the
presuppositions on which our illusion of progress
rests, that it deserves our most serious consideration.

There is nothing in economic intimacies that is likely
to reduce prejudice or promote mutual understandings
automatically. Even when Europeans live amongst
Orientals, " economic contact between the Eastern and
Western groups is practically the only contact there is.
There is very little social or religious give and take
between the two. Each lives in a world almost entirely
closed to the other and by ' closed ' we mean not
only ' unknown ' but more : incomprehensible and
unattainable." 38 That is an inhuman relationship,
by which both parties are degraded.

Neither must it be assumed that the Orient thinks it
important that the masses should learn to read and
write. Literacy is a practical necessity in an industrial
society, where the keeping of accounts is all important.
But in India, in so far as Western methods of education
have not been imposed from without, all higher educa-
tion is imparted orally, and to have heard is far more
important than to have read. At the same time the
peasant, prevented by his illiteracy and poverty from
devouring the newspapers and magazines that form the
daily and almost the only reading of the vast majority

72

Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge

of Western " literates," is, like Hesiod's Boeotian
farmers, and still more like the Gaelic-speaking High-
landers before the era of the board schools, thoroughly
familiar with an epic literature of profound spiritual
significance and a body of poetry and music of in-
calculable value ; and one can only regret the spread
of an " education " that involves the destruction of all
these things, or only preserves them as curiosities
within the covers of books. For cultural purposes it is
not important that the masses should be literate ; it
is not necessary that anyone should be literate ; it is
only necessary that there should be amongst the people
philosophers (in the traditional, not the modern sense
of the word), and that there should be preserved deep
respect on the part of laymen for true learning that is
the antithesis of the American attitude to a " pro-
fessor." In these respects the whole East is still far
in advance of the West, and hence the learning of the
elite exerts a far profounder influence upon society as a
whole than the Western specialist " thinker " can ever
hope to wield.

It is not, however, primarily with a protection of the
East against the subversive inroads of Western " cul-
ture" that Guenon is concerned, but rather with the
question, What possibility of regeneration, if any, can
be envisaged for the West ? The possibility exists
only in the event of a return to first principles and to
the normal ways of living that proceed from the
application of first piinciples to contingent circum-
stances ; and as it is only in the East that these things
are still alive, it is to the East that the West must
turn. " It is the West that must take the initiative,
but she must be prepared really to go towards the East,
not merely seeking to draw the East towards herself,

73

The Bugbear of Literacy

as she has tried to do so far. There is no reason why
the East should take this initiative, and there would
still be none, even if the Western world were not in
such a state as to make any effort in this direction
useless. ... It now remains for us to show how the
West might attempt to approach the East/' 39

He proceeds to show that the work is to be done in
the two fields of metaphysics and religion, and that it
can only be carried out on the highest intellectual
levels, where agreement on first principles can be
reached and apart from any propaganda on behalf of
or even apology for " Western civilization."

The work must be undertaken, therefore, by an
" elite." And as it is here more than anywhere that
Guenon's meaning is likely to be wilfully misinter-
preted, we must understand clearly what he means
by such an elite. The divergence of the West and
East being only " accidental," " the bringing of these
two portions of mankind together and the return of the
West to a normal civilization are really just one and
the same thing." An elite will necessarily work in the
first place " for itself, since its members will naturally
reap from their own development an immediate and
altogether unfailing benefit." An indirect result
" indirect," because on this intellectual level one does
not think of " doing good " to others, or in terms of
" service," but seeks truth because one needs it one-
self would, or might under favourable conditions,
bring about " a return of the West to a traditional
civilization/' i.e. one in which " everything is seen as
the application and extension of a doctrine whose
essence is purely intellectual and metaphysical." 40

It is emphasized again and again that such an elite
does not mean a body of specialists or scholars who

74

Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge

would absorb and put over on the West the forms of an
alien culture, nor even persuade the West to return to
such a traditional civilization as existed in the Middle
Ages. Traditional cultures develop by the applica-
tion of principles to conditions ; the principles, in-
deed, are unchangeable and universal, but just as
nothing can be known except in the mode of the knower,
so nothing valid can be accomplished socially without
taking into account the character of those concerned
and the particular circumstances of the period in which
they live. There is no " fusion " of cultures to be
hoped for ; it would be nothing like an " eclecticism "
or " syncretism " that an elite would have in view.
Neither would such an elite be organized in any way
so as to exercise such a direct influence as that which,
for example, the Technocrats would like to exercise
for the good of mankind. If such an elite ever came
into being, the vast majority of Western men would
never know of it ; it would operate only as a sort of
leaven, and certainly on behalf of rather than against
whatever survives of traditional essence in, for example,
the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic domains.
It is, indeed, a curious fact that some of the most
powerful defenders of Christian dogma are to be found
amongst Orientals who are not themselves Christians,
or ever likely to become Christians, but recognize in
the Christian tradition an embodiment of the universal
truth to which God has never nor anywhere left
himself without a witness.

In the meantime, M. Gu&ion asks, " Is this really
' the beginning of an end ' for the modern civilization ?
... At least there are many signs which should give
food for reflection to those who are still capable of it ;
will the West be able to regain control of herself in

75

The Bugbear of Literacy

time ? " Few would deny that we are faced with the
possibility of a total disintegration of culture. We are
at war with ourselves, and therefore at war with one
another. Western man is unbalanced, and the ques-
tion, Can he recover himself ? is a very real one. No
one to whom the question presents itself can afford to
ignore the writings of the leading living exponent of a
traditional wisdom that is no more essentially Oriental
than it is Occidental, though it may be only in the
uttermost parts of the earth that it is still remembered
and must be sought.

REFERENCES

1 London, Rider, 1928.

2 Paris, 2nd ed., 1932.

8 Paris, 1923, 2nd ed., 1930.

4 Paris, 1921, 2nd ed., 1930.

5 Both Paris, 1925.

6 Paris, 1927.

7 Marseille, 1929.

8 Both Paris, 1930.

9 Paris, 1931.

10 Paris, 1932.

11 Paris, 1939 a lecture delivered at the Sorbonne in
1925 ; 2nd ed. 1946.

12 Cairo, 1943, and London, 1944.

13 Cairo, 1943. Printed Paris, 1946.

14 22me ann6e, 1935.

15 Paris, 1935.

16 Aitareya Aranyaka, Oxford, 1909, p. 42.

17 Laws, 803 B, C ; Philebus, 58 A ; Republic, 521 C, D ;
Timaeus, 47 B, etc.

18 XXXIX, 1942, p. 107.

19 La mdtaphysique orientate, p. 17.

20 Signatura rerum, XV, 24.

Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge

21 Betty Heiman in BSOAS., X, 1943, p. 1048.

22 Harvard Divinity School Bulletin, XXVII, 27.

23 Eastern Religions and Western Thought, p. 257.

24 Adventures of Ideas, 1933, p. 358.

25 Plato, Alcibiades, II, 144 D.

26 Worrington, Form in Gothic, p. 75.

27 Leroy Waterman in JAOS, LVIII, 410.

28 Rt. Hon. Herbert Morrison in the British Association
Report, Science and World Order, January, 1942, p. 33.

29 Professor J. M. Mecklin in Passing of the Saint, p. 197.
80 Lionel Giles in Luzac's Oriental List.

31 Autobiography, pp. 145, 174, 279.

32 Walter Shewring in the Weekly Review, January, 1939.

88 Weekly Review, August 28, 1941.

84 In the New English Weekly, September, 1941.

36 Asia, March, 1942, italics mine.

86 National Research Council, Fatigue of Workers, 1942,

P- 143.

37 East and West, pp. 44, 71.

38 J. H. Boeke, Structure of Netherlands Indian Economy,
1942, p. 68.

89 East and West, p. 162.
40 East and West, p. 241.

77

V : East and West

' ' EAST and West " imports a cultural ]; rather
than a geographical antithesis : an opposition of the
traditional or ordinary way of life that survives in the
East to the modern and irregular way of life that now
prevails in the West. It is because such an opposition
as this could not have been felt before the Renaissance
that we say that the problem is one that presents itself
only accidentally in terms of geography ; it is one of
times much more than of places. For if we leave out
of account the " modernistic " and individual philo-
sophies of to-day, and consider only the great tradition
of the magnanimous philosophers, whose philosophy
was also a religion that had to be lived if it was to be
understood, it will soon be found that the distinctions
of culture in East and West, or for that matter North
and South, are comparable only to those of dialects ;
all are speaking what is essentially one and the same
spiritual language, employing different words, but
expressing the same ideas, and very often by means of
identical idioms. Otherwise stated, there is a univers-
ally intelligible language, not only verbal but also
visual, of the fundamental ideas on which the different
civilizations have been founded.

There exists, then, in this commonly accepted
axiology or body of first principles a common universe
of discourse ; and this provides us with the necessary
basis for communication, understanding, and agree-
ment, and so for effective co-operation in the applica-
tion of commonly recognized spiritual values to the
solution of contingent problems of organization and

78

East and West

conduct. It is clear, however, that all this under-
standing and agreement can be reached and verified
only by philosophers or scholars, if such are to be found,
who are more than philologues and to whom their
knowledge of the great tradition has been a vital and
transforming experience; of such is the leaven or
ferment by which the epigonous and decaying civiliza-
tions of to-day might be "renewed in knowledge."
I quote St. Paul's " in knowledge," not with reference
to a knowledge of the " facts of science " or any power
to " conquer nature," but as referring to the know-
ledge of our Self which the true philosophers of East and
West alike have always considered the sine qua non
of wisdom ; and because this is not a matter of any-
one's " illiteracy " or ignorance of " facts," but one
of the restoration of meaning or value to a world of
" impoverished reality." East and West are at cross-
purposes only because the West is determined, i.e. at
once resolved and economically " determined," to
keep on going it knows not where, and calls this
rudderless voyage (see the woodcut by Eric Gill,
on page one) " progress."

It is far more, of course, by what our ideal
philosophers and scholars, functioning as mediators,
might be, far more by the simple fact of their presence,
as of a catalyst, than by any kind of intervention in
political or economic activities that they could operate
effectively ; they would have no use for yqj
to " represent " their several natioj
and remaining unseen, they could arj
At the present moment I can thinkJ
of this kind : " Ren6 Gu&ion, Frjjfhjj
Pallis ; one cannot consider from
who know only the West or only

79

The Bugbear of Literacy

On the other hand, no mere good will or philan-
thropy will suffice ; and while it is true that correct
solutions will necessarily be good ones, it by no means
follows that what to the altruist seems to be good will
also be right. There is no room here for the prose-
lytizing fury of any " idealists/ 1 What " the century
of the common man " actually predicates is the century
of the economic man, the economically determined man
whose best and worst are equally unprincipled a man
who is far too common for our ends. How many of
our " communists/' I wonder, realize that the reference
of " the common man/' communis homo, was originally
not to the man in the street as such, but to the im-
manent deity, the very Man in everyman ! In the
meantime, what " free enterprise " means is " his
hand the common man's in our sense against every
man's, and every man's hand against him " : and there
lie the fertile seeds of future wars. What we demand is
something other than a quantitative standard of living ;
a form of society in which, in the words of St.
Augustine, " everyone has his divinely co-ordinated
place, and his security, and honour, and content
therein ; and no one is envious of another's high estate,
and reverence, and happiness ; where God is sought,
and is found, and is magnified in everything " ; one
in which, in the words of Pius XII, "all work has an
inherent dignity and at the same time a close con-
nection with the perfection of the person " an almost
literal summary of the true philosophy of work as it
has been propounded by Plato and in the Bhagavad
dta. I know of no form of society in which such a
condition has been more nearly realized than the
Indian, of which the late Sir George Birdwood, himself
a convinced and exemplary Christian, said that " such

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East and West

an ideal order we should have held impossible of
realization, but that it continues to exist [however
precariously], and to afford us, in the yet living results
of its daily operation in India, a proof of the superiority,
in so many unsuspected ways, of -the hieratic civiliza-
tion of antiquity over the secular, joyless, inane, and
self-destructive civilization of the West." 1

We have got to reckon with the fact that almost all
Western nations are either feared or hated and dis-
trusted by almost all Eastern peoples, and to ask
ourselves why this should be so, and whether the
former are unchangeably of such a sort as to seem to
be destroyers everywhere, makers of deserts and
calling them peace. Already in 1761 William Law
asked men to " look at all European Christendom
sailing round the globe with fire and sword and every
murdering art of war to seize the possessions and kill
the inhabitants of both the Indies. What natural
right of man, what supernatural virtue, which Christ
brought down from Heaven, was not here trodden
under foot ? All that you have ever read or heard of
heathen barbarity was here outdone by Christian
conquerors. And to this day, what wars of Christians
against Christians ... for a miserable share in the
spoils of a plundered heathen world." Written
immediately after a year of British military triumphs
" in every quarter of the world," these words, like
those of the concluding chapters of Gulliver's Travels,
might have been written twenty years ago when the
news of the Amritsar massacre had first leaked out,
or when it was officially admitted that at the
beginning of the last war British soldiers repeat-
edly fired on unarmed crowds, when flogging was a
common punishment for political offences, and

81

The Bugbear of Literacy

thousands of elected representatives and other
" political offenders " (most of them committed to the
employment of only " nonviolent " means) were
long in prison without charge or trial, and no man
knew when he might not be arrested and detained
incommunicado in the same way. And all that because
" the loss of India would consummate the downfall of
the British Empire," and the British Government, the
" Holdfast " (Namuci the Indian Fafnir or
" Pharaoh " as described in Ezekiel xxix.3) of the
present age, means to " hold its own " ill-gotten gains
in the name of a " moral responsibility " to peoples who
may have been divided against themselves (divide et
impera), but are certainly not divided in wanting
to be freed to solve their own difficulties. It is no
wonder that the heathen rage ; not in their " blind-
ness," but because they see only too clearly that empire
is a commercial-financial institution having theft as
its final object. 2

But politics and economics, although they cannot
be ignored, are the most external and the least part of
our problem ; it is not through them that understand-
ing and agreement can be reached, but on the contrary
through understanding that the political and economic
problems can be solved. The first spiritual problem in
the solution of which there must be a co-operation
(if we are thinking of anything better than a mere
imposition of our own manners and customs on other
peoples), and with respect to which a common theory
has been entertained, is that of the elimination of the
profit motive by which capital and labour are nowadays
equally dominated and inhibited. In other words,
the problem is that of the restoration of the concept
of vocation, not as a matter of arbitrary " choice/ 1

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East and West

or of passive determination by monetary needs or
social ambition, but of occupations to which one is
imperiously summoned by one's own nature and in
which, accordingly,' every man can be working out at
the same time the perfection of his product and his own
entelechy. For it is inevitably true that in this way,
as Plato says, " more will be done, and better done,
and more easily than in any other way," a proposition
of which the command, " Seek first the kingdom of
God and his righteousness" (Si/cauxnnnj dharma),
and the promise that " all these things shall be added
unto you," is an almost literal paraphrase.

In a vocational order it is assumed that every trade
(i.e. " walk " of life) is appropriate to someone, and
consonant with human dignity ; and this means in
the final analysis, that if there are any occupations that
are not consistent with human dignity, or any things
intrinsically worthless, such occupations and manu-
factures must be abandoned by a society that has in
view the dignity of all its members. This is, then, the
problem of the use and abuse of machines : use, if the
instrument enables the workman to make well what is
needed and in the making of which he can delight, or
abuse if the instrument, in which some other party has
a vested interest opposed to the workman's own,
itself controls the kind and quality of his product.
The distinction is that of the tool (however com-
plicated) that helps the man to make the thing he wants
to make, from the machine (however simple) that must
be served by the man whom it, in fact, controls.
This is a problem that must be solved if the world is
to be made " safe for democracy " and safe from
exploitation ; and that can be solved by agreement
only when the intentions of the traditional " caste "

83 G

The Bugbear of Literacy

systems have been understood, and it has been fully
realized that these intentions can never be fulfilled
within the framework of a capitalist industrialism,
however " democratic," and can only be fulfilled
where production is primarily " for good use." Nor is
this a matter to be regarded only from the producer's
point of view ; there are values also from a consumer's
point of view, and who is not a consumer ? It must
be recognized (the proofs are ready to hand in any
good museum) that machines, as defined above, are
not the equivalent of tools, but substitutes for tools,
and that whatever is made by such machines directly
for human use is qualitatively inferior to what can be
made with the help of tools. I have observed the
standing advertisement of a dealer in used carpets ;
up to $50 is offered for "Americans" and up to $500
for " Orientals." It is ultimately for the consumer
to decide whether he wants to live on a $50 or a $500
level; and no society organized upon the basis of
" the law of the sharks " can expect to do the latter.
The combination of quality with quantity is a chimera
in the likeness of the service of God and Mammon, and
equally impossible. Where we shall not be able to
agree is in thinking that " wealth " or " high standards
of living " can be measured in terms of quantity and
competitive pricing. 8

Failing an understanding and agreement on the
higher levels of reference, there is the imminent danger
that in bringing forth a brave new world in which all
men shall fraternize, this may amount to nothing more
than, if even to so much as, that they may eat, drink,
and be merry together in the intervals of the so-
called peace that occasionally interrupts the wars of
acquisition, pacification, and education. The work of

East and West

"missionaries," whether of a given religion, of scientific
humanism, or industrialism, is a levelling rather than
an elevating force, fundamentally incompatible with
anything but a reduction of the cultures of the world
to their lowest common denominator "Father, for-
give them ; for they know not what they do ! "
Merely to have set up elsewhere replicas of the modern
institutions in which the West for the most part still
believes, although these are the very ways of living
that have already bred disaster, merely to dream of
mixing the oil of " economic justice " with the acid
of a competitive "world trade," is not enough for
felicity ; the backward East, in so far as it is still
" backward," is very much happier, calmer, and less
afraid of life and death than the " forward " West has
ever been or can be. To have set about to " conquer "
nature, to have thought of discontent as " divine,"
to have honoured the discoverers of " new wants," 4
to have sacrificed spontaneity to the concept of an
inevitable " progress " 5 these positions of the " Social
Gospel " are none of those that the East has ever
thought of as making for happiness.

It emerges from what has been said above that
motion toward a rapprochement must originate in the
West ; if only because it is the modern West that first
abandoned the once common norms, while the sur-
viving East that is still in a majority, however dimin-
ished and diminishing, still adheres to them. It is
true that there is another and modernized, uprooted
East, with which the West can compete : but it is only
with the surviving, the superstitious East Gandhi's
East, the one that has never attempted to live by bread
alone that the West can co-operate. Who knows
this East ? It is from our philosophers, scholars, and

85

The Bugbear of Literacy

theologians that we have a right to expect such a
knowledge ; and it is actually, in the first place, upon
our Western universities and churches, our " educa-
tors," that the responsibility of the future of inter-
national relations rests, however little they are
presently and really able to play their part in " dissi-
pating the clouds of ignorance which hide the East
from the West." We need scholars (and that in the
pulpit, in college classrooms, and " on the air ") to
whom not only Latin and Greek, but also Arabic or
Persian, Sanskrit or Tamil, and Chinese or Tibetan
are still living languages in the sense that there are
to be found formulations of principles pertinent to all
men's lives ; we need translators, bearing in mind that
to translate without betrayal one must have experi-
enced oneself the content that is to be " carried across."
We need theologians who can think no more or less in
terms of Christian than of Islamic, Hindu or Taoist
theology, and who have realized by a personal verifica-
tion that, as Philo said, all men " whether Greek or
barbarians " actually recognize and serve one and the
same God, by whatever names, or, if you prefer it,
one and the same immanent " Son of Man," the Son of
whom Meister Eckhart spoke when he said that " he
who sees me, sees my child." We need anthropologists
of the calibre of Richard St. Barbe Baker, Karl von
Spiess, Father W. Schmidt, and Nora K. Chadwick
and such folklorists as were the late J. F. Campbell
and Alexander Carmichael the value of such
men as the late Professor A. A. Macdonell and
Sir J. G. Frazer b&ng only that of hewers of wood
and drawers of water for those who "understand their
material."

We need mediators to whom the common universe

86

East and West

of discourse is still a reality, men of a sort that is rarely
bred in public schools or trained in modern univer-
sities ; and this means that the primary problem is
that of the re-education of Western literati. 6 More
than one has told me how it had taken him ten years
to outgrow even a Harvard education ; I have no idea
how many it might take to outgrow a missionary college
education, or to recover from a course of lectures on
comparative religion offered by a Calvinist. We
need " reactionaries," able to start over again from
scratch from an in principio in the logical rather than
any temporal sense, and very surely not merely in the
ante quo bellum sense, the point at which the education
of the amnesic " common man " of to-day begins.
I mean by " reactionaries " men who, when an impasse
had been reached, are not afraid of being told that " we
cannot put back the hands of the clock" or that
" the machine has come to stay." The real intention
of my reactionaries, for whom there is no such thing as a
" dead past," is not to put back the hands but to put
them forward to another noonday. We need men who
are not afraid of being told that " human nature is
unchangeable " ; which is true enough in its proper
sense, but not if we are under the delusion that human
nature is nothing but an economic nature. What
should we think of a man who has lost his way and
reached the brink of a precipice and is it not " down
a steep place into the sea " that European civilization,
for all its possibly good intentions, is gliding now ?
and is too stupid or too proud to retrace his steps ?
Who, indeed, would not now retrace his steps, if he
only knew how ! The proof of this can be seen in the
multiplicity of the current " plans " for a better world
that men pursue, never remembering that there is

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The Bugbear of Literacy

only " one thing needful." The modern West must be
" renewed in knowledge."

Again, we must beware ; for there are two possible,
and very different, consequences that can follow from
the cultural contact of East and West. One can, like
Jawaharlal Nehru, and in his own words, " become a
queer mixture of East and West, out of place every-
where, at home nowhere " ; or, being still oneself,
one can learn to find oneself " in place " anywhere, and
"at home" everywhere in the profoundest sense, a
citizen of the world.

The problem is " educational," or in other words,
one of " recollection " ; and when it has been solved,
when the West has found herself again the Self of all
other men the problem of understanding the " mys-
terious " East will have been solved at the same time,
and nothing will remain but the practical task of
putting into practice what has been remembered.
The alternative is that of a reduction of the whole
world to the present state of Europe. The choice lies
finally between a deliberately directed movement
toward a foreseen goal or " destiny," and a passive
submission to an inexorable progress or " fate " ;
between an evaluated and significant and a valueless
and insignificant way of living.

REFERENCES

1 Cf. Traherne, Centuries 3.12 : " Verily, there is no
savage under the cope of Heaven, that is more absurdly
barbarous than the Christian world." This is still the
world that Professor Robert Ulich of Harvard so often calls
an " organized barbarism " to-day, and to which he refers
when he says : " The moral record of the white race can

88

East and West

cause no other group on earth to bow in admiration. Let
us say in plain words : ' It is shameful ' " (Conditions of
Civilized Living, 1946, p. 169).

2 " It is very proper that in England a good share of the
produce of the earth should be appropriated to support
certain families in affluence, to produce senators, sages and
heroes for the service and defence of the state . . . but in
India, that haughty spirit, independence and deep thought,
which the possession of great wealth sometimes gives, ought
to be suppressed. They are directly adverse to our political
power " (Skeen Commission Report, H.M. Stationery Office,
London ; and London Times, August, 1927, p. 9) italics
mine.

Such frank cynicism is infinitely preferable to the
sentimentality of those who wonder why the people of India
are not " grateful " for all the benefits that British rule has
conferred upon them. The British civil servant, paid with
Indian money, has no right to devote himself to anything
but the good of India ; he may or may not be personally
lovable, but his work is nothing but his duty, which, if well
done, should earn respect, but hardly gratitude. But
" foreign rule is a terrible curse and the minor benefits it
may confer can never compensate for the spiritual degrada-
tion it involves " (Hindustan Times, November 25,

1945).

8 " If he is not to be disappointed, man must judge well of
those objects which he appoints as his goods . . . certain
things are perfective of him, and others not. He who thinks
that his own love determines things to be good has the
falsity of his love to reveal itself in tragedy. If the thing is
not truly a good of man, it not only will not perfect him, but
he cannot unite it successfully to himself ; between man
and the things that are improper to him there is incon-
gruity " (B. J. Diggs, Love and Being, 1947, p. 160).

4 " The common factor of the whole situation lies in the
simple fact that at any given period the material require-
ments of the individual are quite definitely limited that
any attempt to expand them artificially is an interference
with the plain trend of evolution, which is to subordinate

The Bugbear of Literacy

material to mental and psychological necessity ; and that
the impulse behind unbridled industrialism is not pro-
gressive but reactionary " (Douglas, Economic Democracy,
1918, quoted in Lionel Birch, The Waggoner on the Foot-
plate, 1933, p. 130). " The best virtues of a nation nearly
always begin to disappear when mutual obligations are
converted into money values, because the sense of partner-
ship and obligation becomes lost in a welter of legal without
moral contract. It is not unfair to say that the villein of the
Middle Ages was a freer man and had more security and
dignity of status than the wage-slave of to-day. This aspect
has been overlooked and denied by the Whig historians who
genuinely believed in the glories of laissez-faire and in the
spiritual beauties of ' devil take the hindmost ' " (Earl of
Portsmouth, Alternative to Death, 1944, p. 87).

6 " Dans I'lnde chaque occupation est un sacerdoce. . . .
Les metiers et les rites ne peuvent se distinguer exactement et
le mot Sanskrit karma, ' action,' ' oeuvre,' s'applique aux
deux. ... On peut chasser un mercenaire mais non un
serviteur herdditaire. Done pour rdcolter la tranquillitd et un
bon service, il faut user de tact et de bonnes manibres. Le
service hfreditaire est tout a fait incompatible avec
Vindustrialisme actuel et c'est pourquoi il est peint sous des
couleurs aussi sombres " (A. M. Hocart, Les castes, 1938,
pp. 27, 28, 238). " The most potent factor [in the illusion
called Progress], however, was the triumph of Mammon in
the industrial revolution, which disorganized the Church,
created a new feudalism, and reduced the son of man once
more to servitude, this time to a machine and a machine-
made law. The effect of the last phase is illustrated by the
stress the nineteenth century has laid on punctuality as a
virtue, not as a matter of consideration for the convenience
of others but because an employer could not be expected to
keep a machine waiting for any man ' the son of man/
He became a cog in the great machine, while to the
industrialist, the Holy Spirit, whose divinity he recognized,
was steam. . . . Has the Church, through all her
vicissitudes, retained sufficient of our Lord's teaching and
triumph to restore ' the son of man ' to his due to be seated

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East and West

on the right hand of power ? " (F. W. Buckler, The Epiphany
of the Cross, 1938, pp. 64, 69).

6 " And if our unconscious nationalistic prejudices have
thus prevented any significant philosophical co-operation in
this limited [i.e. European] area, still more completely has
our Occidental superiority complex (which apparently
dominates philosophers as much as other people) blocked
any genuine co-operation between Western and Eastern
thinkers. We just pre-suppose as a matter of course that all
tenable solutions of all real problems can or will be found in
the Western tradition.

" This smug and Pharisaic complacency is one of the
causes of war ; it is also a factor in other causes. And it is
the cause that philosophers are primarily responsible to
remove. They can remove it only by acquiring a deep and
persistent interest in other philosophical perspectives than
their own, especially those in Latin America, Russia, China,
and India. Such an interest will express itself in the expan-
sion of philosophy departments to include teachers of these
subjects ; in increased travel on the part of philosophers,
aided by the establishment of visiting fellowships and
exchange professorships ; and in more general mastery of
the necessary linguistic tools " (E. A. Burtt in The Journal
of Philosophy, 42, 1945, p. 490).

" It is not the so-called realism of power politics, which
because of its neglect of ideas and values is blind and stupid
rather than realistic, but the informed realism of philoso-
phical understanding which is the key to international
relations " (F. S. C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and
West, 1947, pp. 428-9).

VI : " Spiritual Paternity " and the " Puppet
Complex "

These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages
and lands, they are not original with me. If they
are not yours as much as mine, they are nothing, or
next to nothing. Walt Whitman.

THE purpose of this chapter is methodological, and
mainly to suggest that the anthropologist is rather too
much inclined to consider the peculiarities of " primi-
tive people Naturvolker in isolation, neglecting the
possibility or probability that these peculiarities may
not be of local origin, but may represent only pro-
vincial or peripheral survivals of theories held by some
or all of the more sophisticated communities from
which the primitive peoples may have declined.

The first example will be that of the belief of some
Pacific and Australian peoples in a spiritual paternity.
The subject is so well known to anthropologists that it
will suffice to cite from a recent article by Dr. M. F.
Ashley Montagu, 1 who remarks that "practically
everywhere in Australia . . . intercourse is associated
with conception, but not as a cause of conception or
childbirth. 2 . . . The belief is rather that a spirit-
child has entered into her ... it is the official doctrine
of spiritual conception that looms largely in their
thinking . . . intercourse serves to prepare the woman
for the entry of the spirit-child." Further, with
reference to Roheim's data, Professor Montagu re-
marks that "it would seem probable that until the
native is initiated into the social interpretation of the

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" Spiritual Paternity" and " Puppet Complex "

nature of things he is under the impression that inter-
course is closely connected with childbirth ; when,
however, he has been initiated into the traditional
teachings he discovers his former elementary knowledge
to have been incomplete, and he gradually shifts the
emphasis from a belief in material reproduction to one
in favour of spiritual reproduction."

In these citations mark the words " associated
with . . . but not as a cause," " official doctrine,"
and "traditional teachings." Before we proceed
further it should be noted that it is evidence of a
rather considerable intellectual development to be
able to distinguish a post hoc from a propter hoc, con-
comitance from causation. Nor is this by any means
the only available evidence of the " intellectuality "
of the Australian aborigines. But are they any more
likely than any other peoples to have invented, in
any datable sense, their own " official doctrines " ?
Or should an explanation of such phenomena as the
universality of the Symplegades motive be sought in
the motion of the " common denominator " ? One
might as well try to account for the cognate forms of
words in related languages as to try to explain the dis-
tribution of cognate ideas in that way !

The Pacific doctrine of spiritual conception is any-
thing but an isolated phenomenon. For example, it is
explicitly stated in the Buddhist canonical literature
that three things are necessary for conception : the
union of father and mother, the mother's period,
and the presence of the Gandharva* the divine and
solar Eros. The Gandharva here corresponds to the
divine Nature that Philo calls " the highest, elder and
true cause " of generation, while the parents are merely
concomitant causes ; 4 and to Plato's " ever-productive

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Nature " 6 and to St. Paul's " Father " ex quo omnis
paternitas in coelis et terra nominator. 9 It would be
difficult to distinguish these formulations from that
of the Australian aborigines with their initiatory
" official doctrine " in which sexual intercourse is
associated with conception, but not as its cause. It
would be equally difficult to distinguish the Australian
from Aristotle's doctrine that " Man and the Sun 7
generate man," 8 or from Dante's designation of the
Sun, 7 a pregnant light, as " the father of each mortal
life," whose reglowing rays enable each to say, Sub-
sisto* These formulations, in turn, correspond to
those of the Satapatha Brdhmana where it is inasmuch
as they are " kissed," that is breathed upon, by the
Sun 7 that each of the children of men can say " I am "
(asmi) or, in the Commentator's words, " acquires a
self." 10 Again, the Australian distinction of the
mediate from the first cause of conception is closely
paralleled in the Jaiminlya Upani$ad Brdhmana :
" When the [human] father thus emits him as seed into
the womb, it is really the Sun 7 that emits him as seed
into the womb . . . thence is he born, after that seed,
that Breath." 11 One cannot, indeed, distinguish him
" who puts the seed in plants, in cows, in mares and
in women " 12 from Dante's " Sun," or from the " fer-
tility spirit " of the " primitives."

In greater detail, "Say not, 'From semen/ but
' from what is alive ' [therein] " ; 18 that is, " He who,
present in [tithan=instans] the semen, whom the
semen knoweth not . . . whose body [vehicle] the
semen is ... the Immortal " ; 14 " it is that prescient-
spiritual-Self \prajftatman t the Sun] 15 that grasps and
erects the flesh. ' a 6 This, or in other words that ' ' Light
is the progenitive power " 17 are familiar Christian

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" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex "

doctrines. " Present in the semen," for example, has
its equivalent in St. Thomas Aquinas : " The power
of the soul, which is in the semen through the Spirit
enclosed therein, fashions the body/' 18 and so "the
power of generation belongs to God," 19 and in the
words of Schiller, " Es ist der Geist der sich den Kdrper
schaft."

Similarly, St. Bonaventura wrote : " Generatio non
potest fieri in materia generabili et corruptibili secundum
rationes seminales nisi beneficio luminis corporum super
caelestium, quae elongatur a generatione et corruptione,
scilicet a sole, lune et stellis"; 21 and, Jalalu'd Din
Rumi : "When the time comes for the embryo to
receive the vital spirit, at that time the Sun becomes its
helper. This embryo is brought into movement by
the Sun, for the Sun is quickly endowing it with spirit.
From the other stars this embryo received only an
impression, until the Sun shone upon it. By which
way did it become connected in the womb with the
beauteous Sun ? By the hidden way that is remote
from our sense-perception." 22

It would be possible to cite still more material from
other sources, for example, from the American Indians,
in whose mythologies " virgin " is expressed by " non-
sunstruck." But enough has been said to show that
there is, or has been, a more or less general agreement
that Spiritus est qui vivificat, caro non prodest quic-
quam ; 23 and even to-day there are many who can take
seriously the commandment : " Call no man your
father on earth : for one is your Father, which is in
heaven." 24 It is difficult to see how these distinctions
of social from spiritual paternity differ essentially from
the " official doctrine " of the Australian aborigines.

It seems to me that one cannot claim to have

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The Bugbear of Literacy

considered their " traditional teachings " in their true
perspective if their universality is ignored. In any
case, for so long as their beliefs are considered somewhat
strange and peculiar, and as the products of an alien
type of mentality, the question, How is it that so many
and different kinds of men have thought alike ? will
also be ignored. And is not this a question of the most
absorbing interest, and one that is most essentially
" anthropological " ? If it be true, as Alfred Jeremias
said, that the various human cultures are really only
the dialects of one and the same spiritual language 25
it is surely proper for the student of man to ask him-
self when and where this spiritual language may have
originated. In any event, how much easier it becomes
to understand another people's culture, how much
easier to recognize their full humanity, to think with
them rather than merely of or even for them, if the
scholar realizes that their " official doctrines " are the
same as those that have long been current and even
now survive in his own environment !

A second example is that of the " puppet complex."
Dr. Margaret Mead makes use of this expression in her
account of Balinese character, where she remarks :
"The animated puppet, the doll which dances on a
string, the leather puppets manipulated by the
puppeteer, and finally the little girl trance dancers
who themselves become exaggeratedly limp and soft
as they dance to the commands of the audience, all
dramatize this whole picture of involuntary learning, in
which it is not the will of the learner, but the pattern
of the situation and the manipulation of the teacher
which prevail " ; and speaks of " the fantasy of the
body made of separate independent parts . . . the
nation that the body is like a puppet, just pinned

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" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex "

together at the joints." 26 It is implied that these are
especially Balinese peculiarities. Although the obser-
vation is unrelated to any governing first principle,
and so not fully understood, it is excellent in itself :
for it is realized that the dancer's puppet-like relaxa-
tion is that of an obedient pupil, who would be guided
not by her own will, but by a teacher's. One cannot
but recall the words of Christ : " I do nothing of
myself," and " not what I will, but what thou wilt." 27
So said Boehme : " Thou shalt do nothing but forsake
thy own will, viz. that which thou callest ' I/ or ' thy-
self.' By which means all thy evil properties will
grow weak, faint, and ready to die ; and then thou
wilt sink down again into that one thing, from which
thou art originally sprung." 28 The dancer is not, in
fact, expressing " herself," but altogether an artist,
inspired, ivOeos : her condition is quite properly
described as one of trance or ecstasy. The whole pro-
cedure is a carrying over into art of the vital principle
of resignation. Religion and culture, sacred and pro-
fane, are undivided.

Actually, this " complex," " fantasy," or " notion "
terms that are employed all too condescendingly
is nothing peculiarly Balinese, but typically both
Indian and Platonic, and almost as certainly of Indian
origin in Bali as it is of Platonic- Aristotelian derivation
in Europe. It is, moreover, bound up with and
implies two other doctrines, those of Lila 29 and the
Sutratman, 80 and with the traditional symbolism of the
theatre. 31 Plato sees in puppets (Oav^ra) with their
automatic, autokinetic motions, a typical example
of the wonder (ro Oavpdfav) that is the source or
beginning of philosophy : it is " as regards the best in
us that we are really God's toys " and tmght to dance

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accordingly, obeying only the control of that one cord
by which the puppet is suspended from above and not
the contrary and unregulated pulls by which external
things drag each one to and fro in accordance with
his own likes and dislikes. 82 For as Philo also says,
" our five senses," together with the powers of speech
and generation, " all these, as in puppet-shows are
drawn by cords by their Director Kye/iowxos], 38
now resting, now moving, each in the attitudes and
motions appropriate to it/ 134 For a puppet to behave
as it might like were indeed against nature ; the
movements that are induced by personal appetites are
not free, but uncalculated and irregular. But " Nous
is never wrong," 36 and " the Daimon always holds me
back from what ' I ' want to do, and never eggs me
on "; 36 and its truth, unlike that of this man Socrates,
is irrefutable. 37

Dr. Margaret Mead refers to the puppet's joints, and
these are indeed to be regarded as the cogwheels of a
mechanism of which the pins are axles. 38 But what is
more important in the puppet symbolism is the
thread on which its parts are strung and without
which it would fall down inanimate, as actually
happens when one " gives up the ghost " and is " cut
off'" The " notion that the body is like a puppet "
does not depend upon a merely external resemblance
but far more upon the relation of the guiding thread or
threads that the hand of the puppeteer controls, as
reins are held by the driver of a vehicle. " Bear in*
mind that what pulls the string is that Being hidden
within us : that makes our speech, that is our speech, our
life, our Man . . . something more Godlike than the
passions that make us literally puppets and naught
else." 39

" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex "

The analogy is formulated in the Mahdbhdrata
thus : " Human gestures are harnessed by another,
as with a wooden doll strung on a thread." 40 And so
the question is asked " Do you know that Thread, by
which, and that Inner Controller by whom this world
and the other and all beings are strung together and
controlled from within, so that they move like a
puppet, performing their respective functions ? " 41
or, to ask the same question in other words, know Him
questi nei cor mortali I permotore ? 42 know Him questi
la terra in se stringe?** "Elegant wooden shafts
well and newly painted, fastened by threads and
pins . . . such is the likeness of these limbs of ours." 44
" Who made this (wooden) doll ? Where is its maker ?
Whence has it arisen ? How will it perish ? " 45 The
answers to all these questions had long since been given :
" The Sun is the fastening to which these worlds are
linked. ... He strings these worlds to himself by a
thread, the thread of the Gale." 46 So it is that " all
this universe is strung on Me, like rows of gems on a
thread " ; 47 and, " verily, he who knows that thread,
and the Inner Controller who from within controls
this and the other world and all beings, he knows
Brahma, he knows the Gods, the Vedas, Being, Self
and everything." 48 This is the background of the
" puppet complex " of the Balinese, apart from which
it cannot be said that their " character " has been
explained, however carefully it may have been
observed. 49

Puppets seem to move of themselves, but are really
activated and controlled from within by the thread
from which they are suspended from above, and only
move intelligently in obedience to this leash : and it is
in this automatism, or appearance of free will and

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The Bugbear of Literacy

self-motion, that the puppet most of all resembles man.
Puppets are " automata," yes ; but actually no more
than any other machines able to move without a
power put into them or continuously transmitted to
them by an intelligent principle distinct from any or all
of their moving parts. 50 Could they also speak the
language of the traditional philosophy they would say,
" It is not my self, that of these wooden parts, but
another Self, the Self of all puppets, that moves me ;
and if I seem to move of my own will, this is only true
to the extent that I have identified myself and all my
being and willing with the Puppeteer's 51 who made
and moves me." Man-made automata are imitations
of the creations of the mythical craftsmen, Si?/uoiy>yot,
such as Maya, Hephaistos, Daedalus, Regin ; and if
one is not to misunderstand their significance, it must
always be borne in mind that " automatic," which
nowadays implies an involuntary and merely reflex
activity, had originally an almost exactly opposite
meaning, that of " acting of one's own will " or that of
" self-moving." 52 The "automatic doors" of the
Janua Coeli, 53 the Symplegades generally, and their
" automatic " janitors, will be misinterpreted if it is not
realized that it is meant that they are " alive," an
animation that is explicitly denoted by the representa-
tion of the doors as winged in the iconography of the
Sundoor on Babylonian seals.

. One may now be in a position to understand the
transparent myth of the City of Wooden Automata in
the Kathd Sarit Sdgara** Here the hero, Naravah-
anadatta "Theodore" reaches a marvellous city
(aScaryam puram) in which the whole citizenry (paura-
janam) consists of wooden engines or automata
(ka$thamaya-yantram) all behaving as if alive (ce$tam-

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" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex "

dnam safivavaF*) although recognizable as lifeless by
their want of speech ; and this arouses his wonder
(vismayanOavpa.)** He enters the palace, and sees
there a comely man (bhavyam* 1 puru?am) enthroned
and surrounded by janissaries and female guards ;
this man is the only consciousness (ekakam cetanam**)
there, and is the cause of motion in the insensible folk,
" even as the Spirit overstands the powers of perception
and action " indriydnam ivdtmdnam adhisthdtftayd
sthitam In reply to questions, the King explains
that he, Rajyadhara the royal power is one of the
two sons of King Bahubala " Armstrong " and
that his brother Pranadhara the pneumatic power
having robbed his father's treasury and dallied with his
fortune, both have fled. " Both of us," he says, " are
carpenters, 61 expert in the making of artful wooden
and other automata or engines, like those produced
by Maya " 60 tak$anau . . . mdyd-praniteva darvddi-
maya-yantra-vicak$anau. Rajyadhara continues in
saying, " I finally reached this empty city [iunyam
pur am] and entered the palace." There in the heart of
the palace he is fed by invisible hands : and " all these
automata [yantra] are no mere products of my imagina-
tion, for I made them. It is by the will of the Disposer
that I, even being a carpenter, have come here, and am
enjoying the sport of a king, as a God all alone by my-
self " (ihdgatya tak$dpi devaikdki karomy aham rdjfto
ttldyitam)

No one at all familiar with the traditia
Greek psychology will doubt that they
Automata is macrocosmically the
cosmically man the man whose
is so called because of his being
"body." 62 The "golc
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" heart " of the " Golden City," the centre from which
all its operations are directed. To Rajyadhara his
retainers, the psychic powers of perception and action,
like the subjects of earthly kings, bring all kinds of
food by which the Spirit is nourished when it thus
comes eating and drinking. 63 That his food of all
kinds is thus served by invisible hands, and that he
repeoples a Waste Land (iunyam pur am), is a re-
minder that he is effectively the " Rich King " of a
" Grail Castle." As the " sole consciousness " in the
City of Wooden Automata, Rajyadhara corresponds
to the " Only Thinker, your Self, the Inner Controller,
Immortal" of the Upanisads. 64 The original "rob-
bery " referred to is that of the sources of life, the
Indian Rape of Soma and the Greek Promethean theft
of fire ; it is only by such a " theft " that the world
can be quickened, but it necessarily involves the
separation or exile of the immanent principles from
their transcendent source. Rajyadhara rightly speaks
of himself as a God.

If there could be any doubt that these are the real
meanings of the story of the Golden City (hemapura)
or that this would have been obvious to almost any
Indian hearer, it can be dissipated not only by a
consideration of the parallel wordings of the scriptural
passages already cited, but also by a comparison with
the Tripurd Rahasya,** where it is again the question
of a " city " and its citizens, and it is told that the
Migrant or Precedent (pracara),** though single,
"multiplies himself, manifests as the city and its
citizens and pervades them all, protects and holds
them," and that "without him they would all be
scattered and lost like pearls without the string of the
necklace," 67 and it is perfectly clear that, as the text

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" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex "

itself later explains, the Migrant is the Breath or
Life -prdna and the city the body, of which the parts
are strung on Him.

All these formulations, furthermore, clarify the mean-
ings of the term sutra-dhdra as stage manager and
carpenter or architect ; for these are one and the same
in divinis, and so far as the puppet play is concerned
may be one and the same in human practice. One
does not have to suppose with Pischel 68 that the Indian
drama originated in a puppet play of unknown
antiquity; or, on the other hand, that the sutra-
dhdra is a " carpenter " merely because he carries a
measuring line. The origins of drama and of architec-
ture are mythical, and both are equally " imitations "
of divine prototypes. 69 It is because, whether as the
Artist who makes or as the Controller who manages
his " toys," as Plato calls them, the All-Maker, Vi-
vakarma, is the " Holder of every Thread " (viva-
sutra-dhrk), 7Q that the human artist and the stage
manager are, in the likeness and image of God, equally
" Holders of a Thread." 71

Enough has been said to show that the doctrine of
" spiritual paternity " is nothing peculiarly Pacific or
Australian, and that the so-called " puppet complex "
is nothing peculiarly Balinese ; enough also to show
that the Australian " official doctrine " is an intellectual
formulation rather than a proof of nescience, 72 and
that the expression " complex/ 1 implying a psychosis,
is quite irrelevant to describe what is in fact a meta-
physical " theory." Such formulations cannot be
properly evaluated or seen in any true perspective as
long as they are treated as purely local phenomena to
be explained in some evolutionary or psychological
way on the sole premise of the environment in which

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they happen to have been observed; but only if they are
related to the whole spiritual-cultural horizon into the
pattern of which they naturally fit, and of which they
may be only the peripheral " superstitions," in the
strictly etymological sense of this excellent but much
abused term. 73 The student of " primitive beliefs "
and of " folklore " must be, if he is not to betray his
vocation, not so much a psychologist in the current
sense as he must be an accomplished theologian and
metaphysician.

These general considerations are also of the highest
importance if anthropology is to amount to any-
thing more than another satisfaction of our curiosity ;
if, that is to say, it is to subserve the good of mankind
by enabling men to understand one another, and even
to think with one another, rather than merely of one
another as strangers. For example, Marsilio Ficino,
Meister Eckhart, William Law, and Hafiz are thinking
with one another when all employ the figure of the
" hook " with which the Fisher King angles for his
human prey ; 74 or the Celt is thinking with the Buddhist
when both are agreed that " He who would be chief,
let him be your bridge." 75 Even so the Australian is
thinking with Christ when in fact, having been initiated,
he too calls "no man father on earth." And so, as
was previously indicated, there is a real connection,
though it may have been prehistoric, between Margaret
Mead's observation " limp and soft," Jacob Boehme's
" weak, faint and ready to die," and the fact that
" all scripture cries aloud for freedom from self."
It is because of their acceptance of this point of view
that, to the modern mentality to which it is so re-
pugnant, the members of traditional and "unani-
mous" societies seem not yet to -have distinguished

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" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex "

themselves from their environment ; and the irony of
the situation is this, that the modern proletarians, to
whom the notions of individuality and self-expression
are so important, are themselves of all peoples the
least individualized and the most like a herd. 76

A culture such as the Balinese is so completely
moulded and pervaded by its inherited "official
doctrine " that a " correct " or " orthodox " deport-
ment in any given situation has become a second
nature : it is now no longer necessary to remember the
rules of the game because the habit of the art of life is
now engrained. 77 In " forsaking her own will, viz.
that which thou callest ' I,' or ' thyself. 1 " the Balinese
dancer in her rapt ecstasy is not a product of any
peculiarly Balinese " complex," but of the Philosophia
Perennis.

Plato says that it is as regards the best in human beings
that they are most really God's playthings. And this
notion, that what is called " their " life is really a
divine sporting, in which their part is free and active
only to the extent that their wills are merged in his
who plays the game, is one of man's deepest insights.
As Jalalu'd Dm Rumi states, " Who so hath not
surrendered will, no, will hath he. 1 ' So says also
Angelus Silesius :

Dieses A lies ist ein Spiel, das ihr der Gottheit macht ;
Sie hat die Kreatur urn ihretwillen gedacht.

Whoever accepts this point of view will feel that he
" ought " to act accordingly ; and as the expression
"walking with God," Plato's Oc<*> ^woTraSciv, Skr.
brahmacarya, implies, this is for the puppet his true
Way. The only alternative is that of a passive sub-
jection to the " pullings and haulings " of the " ruling

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passions," rightly so called when they become the
determinants of conduct. 78 " Ought " is expressed in
Greek by Set, from Wo>, " bind," the root in Sccr/ios,
that is, the " bond " by which, as Plutarch says,
Apollo binds (owSe?) all things to himself and
orders them. 79 That bond is precisely Plato's " golden
cord " by which the puppet should be guided if it is to
play its proper part, avoiding the disorderly move-
ments that are provoked by its own desires ; and the
" rein " by which the sensitive steeds must be con-
trolled if they are not to miss the way. This is the
" clue " to which one must hold fast, if one is to play
the game intelligently, and spontaneously, or " auto-
matically."

In the Tripurd Rahasya* the picture is drawn of an
ideal city-state, that of a characteristically Indian
Utopia and at the same time very like Plato's Republic.
The Prince, instructed by his wife, has become a free
man (jwan-mukta) liberated in this life, here and now
from all the " knots of the heart " and above all from
the strongest of these, that of the " identification of the
flesh with the Self, which identification in its turn
gives rise to the incessant flux of happiness and misery,"
and being liberated, he performs his royal duties
efficiently but absent-mindedly and " like an actor on
the stage" (natavad rangamandale). Following his
example and instruction, all the citizens attain a like
liberty, and are no longer motivated by their passions,
although still possessing them. The consequences are
by no means " antisocial " ; on the contrary, worldly
affairs are still carried on in this ideal free state, in
which its citizens continue to play their parts, by force
of former preoccupation, but now "without thinking
of past good or evil fortune, or counting on future joys

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" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex "

or pains ; 81 in their everyday life laughing, rejoicing,
wearied or angered, like men intoxicated and in-
different to their own affairs. 82 Wherefore Sanaka and
other sages who visited there called it the ' City of
Resplendent Wisdom.' "

That in this ideal City of God it is the actor that
represents the norm of conduct is especially pertinent
in the present context. Here " all the world's a
stage," without distinction of action as conduct from
action as drama, and everyone still plays the part that
he " ought " to play, if the city is to prosper. 85 The
true actor, then, whether in life or in his own profession,
" acts without acting " in the sense of the Bhagavad
Gita and the Taoist wei wu wei doctrine. He does not
identity himself with the part, and is not infected
(na lipyate) by what he does on the stage : his role, as
men regard it, may be that of either saint or sinner,
but like God he remains himself and untroubled by the
thought, " Thus I did right," or " Thus I did wrong," 84
being above the battle. 85

So the Balinese dancer, who is not " expressing
herself," but playing her part impersonally, is by no
means the victim of a " complex," but merely a perfect
actress : and the members of any other society, all of
whom have their part to play but for the most part
want to be " stars," might learn from her, if they
would, what is the distinction of acting from merely
behaving, which is that of spontaneity from licence.
It is not enough to have " observed," however
accurately: it is only when the anthropologist has
profoundly understood what he sees, when he has
really entertained the ideas of which the spectacle is a
demonstration, that it can become for him a serious
experience. 88

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REFERENCES

1 Montagu, M. F. Ashley, " Nescience, Science and
Psycho-Analysis," Psychiatry (1941) 4.45-60. References
to the literature will be found in this article.

2 The italics here are original. Those in the two following
quotations are mine.

3 Majjhima Nikdya 1:265-266. Gandharvas and
Apsarases are the rulers with respect to progeny or lack of
progeny Pancavimsa Brahmana 1X13.1.

4 Philo Judaeus, Quis rerum divinarum heres 115.

5 Plato, Laws 773 E.
6 Ephesians iii.15.

7 In all these contexts in which " Sun " has been
capitalized the reference is, of course, to the " inward Sun "
as distinguished from " the outward sun, which receives its
power and lustre from the inward " Boehme, Jacob,
Signatura rerum XI 75, to the " Sun of the Angels " as
distinguished from the " sun of sense " Dante, Paradise
X:53-54 ; compare Convito III:i2, 50-60. This " Sun of the
sun " Philo Judaeus, De specialis legibus 1:279 ; compare
De cherubim 97 Apollo as distinguished from Helios
Plato, Laws 898 D, Plutarch, Moralia 393 D, 400 C, D is
not " the sun whom all men see " but " the Sun whom not
all know with the mind " Atharva Veda X:8.i4, " whose
body the sun is " Brhadaranyaka Vpanisad 111:7.9. The
traditional distinction of intelligible from sensible, invisible
from visible " suns " is essential to any adequate under-
standing of " solar mythologies " and " solar cults. 11

8 Aristotle, Physics 11:2.

9 Dante, Paradise XXII:n6 and XXIX:i5.

10 Satapatha Brahmana VII:3.2.i2. See Coomaraswamy,
Ananda K., " Sunkiss," JAOS (1940) 60:46-67; and
" Primitive Mentality," Quarterly Journal of the Mytho-
logical Society (1940) 31:69-91. To the Sunkiss corresponds
" the caress of Zeus by his on-breathing " ^Eschylus,
Suppliants ; 344-345 P. W. Smyth's version.

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" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex "

11 Jaiminlya Upanisad Brdhmana III:io.4. Compare
PancavimSa Brdhmana XVI:i4.5.

12 Rgveda VII:i02.2. One hardly needs to say or seek to
demonstrate that the Christian and pagan solar symbolisms
are homologous. An illustration can be cited, however, hi
St. Ambrose's Hymnus Matutinus :

Verusque sol, illabere
Micans nitore perpeti ;
Jubarque Sancti Spiritfts
Infunde nostris sensibus

which is an almost literal equivalent of the Vedic Gayatri,
Rgveda III:62.io.

13 Brhaddranyaka Upanisad 111:9.28.

14 Reference footnote 13 ; 111:7.23.

15 This equation is explicit in Aitareya Aranyaka 111:2.3,
where also Keith remarks that this is " the most common
doctrine in the Upanisads." The " Sun " hi question is the
Sun of Rgveda 1:115.1, " the Spiritual-Self [atmari) of all
that is mobile or immobile."

Kausitaki Upanisad 111:3.

17 Taitiiriya Samhitd VII:i.i.i, Satapatha Brdhmana
VIII:7.i.i6. Cf. John i.4 " the life was the light." From
the same point of view : Prima substantiarum est lux . . .
Unumquodque quantum habet de luce tantum retinet esse
divini Witelo, Liber de intelligentiis t VI, VIII.

18 Summa Theologica III:zi. This is essentially Pytha-
gorean doctrine : " the seed is an efflux of brain containing
hot vapour (Btppov dr/xov) within it ... soul and
sensibility are from the vapour within " (Diogenes Laertius
VIII.28). Here arp,6s = irvevpa = spirit, and etymo-
logically Skr. atman.

19 Reference footnote 18 ; 1:45.5.

20 von Schiller, Johann C., Wallenstein III:i3.

21 St. Bonaventura, De reductione artium ad theologian
21 ; cf. Philo Judaeus, Quis rerum divinarum heres 115,
" Are not the parents, as it were, concomitant causes only,
while [the divine] Nature is the highest, elder and true cause

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of the begetting of children ? " I add " the divine," only to
remind the reader that Philo's " Nature " is not the visible
and objective world, but that aspect of God's power by
which he creates, Plato's aictycvrjs $v<n$, "the eternal
Nature " that we acknowledge in the begetting of
descendants Laws 773 E.

It comes to the same thing to say that " the Breath is the
progenitive power " and so that " man is propagated from
the Breath " Pancavimsa Brahmana XVI:i4.5, since the
Breath pranah is commonly identified with the Sun, the
pneumatic with the luminous principle.

22 Jalalu'd Din Rumi, Mathnawi 1:3775-3779.

28 John vi.63.

24 Matthew xxiii.g.

25 Jeremias, Alfred Handbuch der Altorientalischen Geistes-
kultur [2nd ed.] ; Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 1929 (xvii and
508 pp.) ; in particular, the Foreword.

28 Bateson, Gregory, and Mead, Margaret, Balinesc
Character : A Photographic Analysis, New York, New York
Academy of Sciences, 1942 (xvi and 277 pp.), pp. 17 and
91.

27 John viii.28 ; Mark xiv.36.

28 Boehme, Jacob, "Discourse Between Two Souls,"
Signatura rerum, New York, Dutton, n. d. (288 pp.).

29 Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., " Lila," JAOS (1941)
61:98-101 ; and " Play and Seriousness," Journal of
Philosophy (1942) 39-'55-552-

80 Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., Figures of Speech or
Figures of Thought, 1946, reference footnote 30, p. 236 ;
"Symbolism," Dictionary of World Literature; "The
Iconography of Diirer's * Knots ' and Leonardo's ' Con-
catenation/ " Art Quarterly (1944) 7:109-128. See also
Sankaracarya, Sata&oki 12 and 55 : man is a bead strung
on the thread of the conscious Self, and just as wooden
puppets are worked by strings, so the world is operated by
the Thread-Spirit.

81 Cf. Gu&ion, Ren6, " Le symbolisme du Mdtre" Le Voile
d'Isis (1932) 37:65-70.

82 Plato, Theatetus 155 D ; and Laws 644 and 803-844.

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" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex "

83 Dux, Duke, Leader, Guide ; the solar Leader ; net? of
Rgoeda Vrso.i and " Self of self, the Immortal Leader "
atmano' tma netamrtah, of Maitri Upanisad VI:?.

34 Philo Judaeus, De opificio mundi 117.

86 Aristotle, De anima Illno, 433 A.

36 Plato, Apology 31 D ; and Phaedrus 242 B.

37 Plato, Symposium 201 C.

88 It is not so much the function of the pins to hold the
joints together as to enable the limbs to move freely. Pegs
(yo^oL, Plato, Timaeus 43 A) on which the joints (apOpa)
move, and comparable to the hinges (7/0/^01) of doors
(Parmenides in Sextus Empiricus, Adversus dogmatos in)
are, indeed, employed ; and these are also called pivots
(orpd^tyye?), but the limbs are bound together by the
sinews (vcvpa) that tighten and loosen round the pivots,
and so move the parts of the body as if on hinges Timaeus
74 B. These sinews are the physical counterparts of the
psychic " bonds of life " Timaeus 73 B that are dissolved
at death Timaeus 81 E ; Philo Judaeus, Quis rerum
divinarum heres 242, Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 11:7.2 ;
Maitri Upanisad 1:4. It is by the "thread " that the parts
are really co-ordinated and moved : as in man " it is by the
Breath that the joints are united," prdnena sarvdni parvani
samdadhati, the vital Breath that is called the " Thread-
Spirit," sutratman, " that links up [samtanoti] this world "
Aitareya Aranyaka 1:4.2,3. See other references in
reference footnote 30.

89 Marcus Aurelius, X:38 and XII:ig ; cf. 11:2, III:i6,
VI:i6, VII:3, VH:2g.

The puppet symbolism is closely related to the Indian,
Platonic, Neoplatonic, and later symbolism of the chariot,
of which the steeds are the sensitive powers that seek their
own pastures and must be curbed and guided by the know-
ing driver, the Reason, who only knows the Way or " Royal
Road."

40 Mahdbharata, Udyoga Parvan 32:12.

41 Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 111:7.1; cf. 4.1, combined
with Sankara's commentaries.

42 Dante, Paradiso I:ii6 : corresponding to Maitri

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Upanisad 11:6, " from within this heart of ours, the Mover,"
asmad-dhfd-antarat pracodayitr.

43 Dante, reference footnote 42, 1:117.

44 Therigatha 390, 391.

45 Samyutta Nikaya 1:134.

M $atapatha Brahmana 1:7.1.17 and 111:7.3.10.

47 Bhagavad Glta VII 7 ; compare Tripura Rahasya,
Jfiana Khanda, V:ii9-i24 reference footnote 65.

48 Brhadaranyaka Upanisad III:7.i.

49 The reviewer of another work of Dr. Margaret Mead's,
The American Character, one of the Pelican Books, justly
remarks on " the danger of ... providing psychological,
or even biological reasons for traits which should be treated
metaphysically " New English Weekly (1944) 25:132. The
" psychological " explanations themselves will be in-
adequate if the traditional psychology, for example, that of
Philo and the Bhagavad Glta, is overlooked. In this
traditional psychology it is maintained that there can be no
greater error or source of evil than to conceive that " / am
the doer." From the point of view of anyone who accepts
this axiology,the behaviour of the Balinese dancer is simply
natural, and that of the modern, self-expressive " artist,"
unnatural.

60 For example, when La Met trie says, " The human body
is a machine that winds its own springs," he is " explaining "
a phenomenon by something else of a sort that never was on
sea or land, something as inconceivable as " the son of a
barren woman." When he continues by saying that " the
soul is but a principle of motion or material and sensible
part of the brain," he is propounding two entirely different
theories, of which the first is Plato's, and the second reverts
to his own unthinkable " machine." My citation of La
Mettrie is taken from Urban, Wilbur Marshall, Language
and Reality, New York, Macmillan, 1939 (755 pp.) ; in
particular p. 314.

In what sense man can be properly compared to a
machine is discussed by Schrodinger, Erwin, What is Life ?,
Cambridge, Macmillan, 1945.

"Skr. $&tra-dhara, " holder of the thread," and so

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" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex "

" puppeteer/ 1 " stage manager," and " carpenter." It is
not insignificant, also, that the puppets are " wooden " ;
the " primary matter " of which the world is made being a
" wood " v Xrj, Skr. vana and the maker therefore a
" carpenter."

62 Iliad 11:408 ; Hesiod, Marriage of Ceyz 2 and Opus
103, where the term is used of persons or personified powers.
Aristotle, Physics 11:6, indeed, interprets " automaton " to
mean " in itself to no purpose," and so " accidental " or
" random " ; but this is inconsistent with the meanings
already cited and with the use of avroparov with <f>va) t
" grow " cf. Skr. svaruh = avro</>vri$ and according to
most scholars the root meaning is that of " acting of one's
own will." The true analogy is with TO cavro /avciv,
" self-motion," which is the highest kind of motion Plato,
Phaedrus 264 A, Laws 895. The problem turns, as usual,
upon the question, What or which is the " self " implied,
outer mortal or inner immortal? the latter being the true

63 Iliad V:4og ; compare Suparnddhydya XXV:i, and the
" Active Doors " of Celtic mythology.

64 Kathd Sarit Sdgara 11:9.1-59 tar. 43, see Penzer,
N. M., Ocean of the Streams of Story (1925) 3 : begin p. 280,
and further 3:56 and 9:149 ; Penzer discusses automata, but
he has not the least conception of their theory.

56 Cestamdnam corresponding to cestate in the Mahdb-
hdrata t reference footnote 40.

56 Such " wonder " as is the beginning of philosophy,
Plato, Theatetus 155 D, and Aristotle, Metaphysics 982 B.

67 Bhavya, future participle of bhu, " become," takes on
the sense of " comely " in the same way that English
" becoming " takes on the meaning " suitable," " as it
should be."

58 The formulas here are very closely related to those of
Maitri Upanisad 11:6 and Bhagavad GUd XVIII:6i. In the
Upanisad, Prajapayi, " from within the heart," animates
and motivates his otherwise lifeless offspring, setting them
up in possession of consciousness (cetanavat). In the Gita
Sri Krishna, speaking of himself, says : " The Lord, seated

The Bugbear of Literacy

in the heart of all beings, maketh them all, by his art, to
wander about, mounted on their engines/ 1 iivarah
sarvabhutdndm hrddese . . . tisfhati, bhrdmayan sarvab-
hutdni yantrdrudhdni mdyayd.

69 This is, again, a statement of the traditional psychology
that everywhere underlies the " puppet complex " and the
chariot symbolism ; cf . reference footnote 49.

60 The Titan Maya, who may be compared to Hephaistos,
Daedalus, Wayland, and Regin, is the great Artist whose
daughter, in the Kathd Sarit Sdgara VI:3, Penzer 3:42,
Somaprabha, exhibits a variety of engines or automata, and
explains that these artful and self-empowered wooden dolls,
these crafty mechanical works of art (kdsthamayih sva-
mdyd-yantra-putrikdh . . . mdyd-yantrddi-s'ilpdni) were
originally " emanated (srstdni) by my father of old," and
that there are five sorts corresponding, like " that great
engine, the world " (cf. Marsilio Ficino, Symposium IV.5,
" machine del mondo "), to the five elements, " but the
Wheel that guards the Water of Life, that he alone, and no
other, understands."

61 On this royal " sport " see reference footnote 29, and cf.
also Clement of Alexandria, Instructor I ; chapter 5 : " O
wise sport, laughter assisted by endurance, and the king as
spectator . . . and this is the divine sport. ' Such a sport
of his own, Jove sports, 1 says Heracleitus. The King, then,
who is Christ, beholds from above our laughter, and looking
through the window, views the thanksgiving and the
blessing." Clement's " spectator " corresponds to the
preksaka of Maitri Upanisad II: j.

" But the Nitya and the Lila are the two aspects of the
same reality. . . . The Absolute plays in many ways : as
Igvara, as the gods, as man, and as the universe. The
Incarnation is the play of the Absolute as man . . . The
formless God is real, and equally real is God with form."
The Gospel of Sri Rdmakrishna, New York, Ramakrishna-
Vivekananda Centre, 1942 (xxiii and 1063 pp.), pp. 358-359.

62 This assumes the etymology of purusa as given in
Brhaddrayyaka Upanisad 11:5.18, and the connection of &
with KiaQcu. I have dealt more fully with the Indian and

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" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex "

corresponding Greek concept of man as a City of God
brahmapura, Hieropolis, Civitas Dei in my " Civilization "
in the Albert Schweitzer Jubilee Volume (ed. A. Roback,
Cambridge, 1946).

63 " That Golden Person in the Sun, who from his golden
place looks down upon this earth, is even He who dwells in
the lotus of the heart, and eateth there of food," Maitri
Upanisad V:i ; cf. Rgveda X:go.2, " When He rises up by
food." " He, indeed, is the great, unborn Spiritual-Self,
who is the Discriminant amongst the powers of the soul.
In the ether of the heart reclines the Ruler of All, the Lord
of All, the King of All," Brhaddranyaka Upanisad IV:4.22 ;
cf. Chdndogya Upanisad VIII:i.i-6. "To this same Life
[prdna] as Brahma, all these divinities bring tribute un-
asked," Kausitaki Upanisad II:i, cf. Atharva Veda X:7.39
and 8.15. In all these contexts, as for Plato, " food " is
whatever aliment nourishes the physical or psychic powers,
body or mind.

64 Brhaddranyaka Upanisad 111:8.23 ; " He who sets up
this body in possession of consciousness, and moves it,"
Maitri Upanisad n.6.

66 Jnana Khanda 1119-124 Iyer, M. S. Venkatarama
[tr.], Jnana Khanda. Quart. J. Myth. Soc. (1937) 28:170-
219, 269-289 ; (1938) 29:39-57, 189-207 ; (1939) 29:329-351,
466-499 the text in the Sarasvati Bhavana Texts, Number

15 (1925-1933)-

66 In theology, " procession " is the coming forth or
manifestation of the deity as or in a Person. This appear-
ance on the stage of the world is a " descent " avatar aria
strictly comparable to that of the actor who emerges from
the greenroom to appear in some disguise. The reference
of the text is to the procession of the Spirit, prajndtman or
prdria.

67 As in the Bhagavad Gltd VII.7. Cf. reference footnote
30-

68 Pischel, Richard, Die Heimat des Puppenspiels t Halle,
Hallesche Rektorreden II, 1900 ; for the English version
refer to Tawney, Mildred C., The Home of the Puppet Play,
London , Luzac, 1902 (32 pp.).

The Bugbear of Literacy

61 " Human works of art are imitations of divine proto-
types." Aitareya Brahmana VI:27.

70 This term occurs with reference to Vishnu as the
Creator.

71 It has been well said by the late Professor Arthur
Berriedale Keith that " it is indeed to ignore how essentially
religion enters into the life of the Hindu to imagine that it is
possible to trace the beginnings of drama to a detached love
of amusement." The Sanskrit Drama, Oxford, Clarendon
Press, 1924 (405 pp.), p. 52. In dealing with any traditional
civilization it must always be realized that no real distinc-
tion can be drawn there as of culture from religion or
profane from sacred. Such distinctions, like that of utility
or value from meaning or beauty, are the products of a
modern schizophrenia.

72 A blind faith in " progress " makes it all too easy to
accuse the " backward races " of ignorance or a " prelogical
mentality." " Lorsque nous ne comprenons pas un
ph&nomene iconographique, nous sommes toujours tenths de
dire que nous comprenons fort bien mais que c'est indigene
qui est maladroit ou ria pas compris," Hentze, Carl, Ob jets
rituels, croyances et dieux de la Chine antique et de I'Amerique,
Anvers, " De Sikkel " Editions, 1936 (119 pp., 230 figs., 12
plates) ; in particular p. 33. "Das Marchenhaft-Wunderbare
muss daher mit ganz anderen Augen als mit unseren natur-
wissenschaftlich geschulten angesehen werden," Preuss, K.
Th., in Thurnwald, R., Lehrbuch der Vdlkerkunde (1939),
P- 127.

73 " Backward communities are the oral libraries of the
world's ancient cultures " (Chadwick, N. K., Poetry and
Prophecy, Cambridge University Press, 1942 [xvi and no
pp.] , xv) . ' ' These beliefs of theirs have been preserved until
now as a relic of former knowledge " (Aristotle, Metaphysics
XII:8.io). " La memoire collective conserve quelquefois
certains details precis d'une ' thiorie ' devenue depuis long-
temps inintelligible . . . des symboles archatques d'essence
purement mtiaphysique " Eliade, Mircea, Les livres popu-
laires dans la literature roumaine t if Zalmoxis (1939) 11:78.
If the fundamental sources of custom and belief are those of

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" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex "

a metaphysical tradition, the anthropologist in search of
explanation and understanding must be familiar with this
tradition.

74 Marsilio Ficino, ". . . . the soul inflamed by the divine
splendour ... is secretly lifted up by it as if by a hook in
order to become God/ 1 Opera Omnia, p. 306, cited by
Kristeller, P. O., The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, New
York, Columbia University Press, 1943 (xiv and 441 pp.)
half title : " Columbia Studies in Philosophy," Number 6 ;
p. 267. " For love is like the fisherman's hook " Pfeiffer,
Franz, Meister Eckhart, Gottingen, Vandenhoek and
Ruprecht, 1924 (x and 686 pp.), p. 29. " Love is my bait
. , . it will put its hook into your heart," William Law,
cited by Stephen Hobhouse, William Law, 1943, p. 109.
Hafiz, " Fish-like in the sea behold me swimming, till he
with his hook my rescue maketh," Leaf, Walter, Versions
from Hafiz (1898) n:XII. All implied by Mark 1.17, " I will
make you fishers of men." There are but few doctrines or
symbols that can be adequately studied on the basis of single
sources to which they seem to be peculiar if their
universality is overlooked.

76 See Coomaraswamy, Dona Luisa, " The Perilous Bridge
of Welfare," HJAS (1944) 8:196-213. Cf. the Roman
Imperator, who was also the Pontifex Maximus.

76 Nothing, of course, is stranger or more unwelcome to
the modern mentality than is the idea of " self-naughting."
Liberty of choice has become an obsession ; the superior
liberty of spontaneity is no longer understood. For those
who are afraid I cite : "I can no more doubt . . . what to
me is fact, perceived truth ; namely, that any person would
be infinitely happier if he could accept the loss of his
' individual self ' and let nature pursue her uncharted
course." Hadley, Ernest E., Psychiatry (1942) 5:131-134 ;
p. 134. Cf. Sullivan, Harry Stack, Psychiatry (1938)
1:121-134. " Here (in the emphasized individuality of each
of us, ' myself ') we have the very mother of illusions, the
ever pregnant source of preconceptions that invalidate all
our efforts to understand other peoples. The psychiatrist
may, in his more objective moments, hold the correct view

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of personality, that it is the hypothetical entity that one
postulates to account for the doings of people ... in his
less specialized moments the same psychiatrist joins the
throng in exploiting his delusions of unique individuality.
He conceives himself to be a self-limited unit that alternates
between a state of insular detachment and varying degrees
of contact with other people and with cultural entities. He
arrogates to himself the principal role in such of his actions
as he ' happens ' to notice." To believe in one's own or
another's " personality " or " individuality " is animism.
In the traditional philosophy it is emphasized that " per-
sonalities " are inconstants, ever changing and never
stopping to " be " ; " we " are not entities, but processes.
Dr. Sullivan's words are whether or not by intention an
admirable summary of the Buddhist doctrine of anatta. An
attachment of permanent value to personality will be
impossible for anyone who has seen things " as become "
yathd-bhutam, objectively, as causally determined processes.
The first step on the way to a liberation from " the mother
of illusions/' and so toward an " infinite happiness," is to
have realized by a demonstration that " this (body and
mind) is not my Self," that there is no such thing as a
" personality " anywhere to be found in the world. Life in
a world of time and space is a condition of incessant change ;
and, as Plato asks, " How can that which is never in the
same state be anything ? " Cratylus 439 E. Almost the
first step in clear thinking is to distinguish becoming from
being. The important thing is to know what " we " really
are ; but this is a knowledge that can only be acquired to
the extent that " we " eliminate from our consciousness of
being, all that We are not. This is the Platonic KaOapms,
Skr. Buddha karana.

77 Contemporary western dancing is hardly more than a
kind of calisthenics, and a spectacle ; in the traditional art,
which survives elsewhere, " all the dancer's gestures are
signs of things, and the dance is called rational, because it
aptly signifies and displays something over and above the
pleasure of the senses." St. Augustine, De ordine 34 : cf.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., and Duggirala, G, K., Mirror

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" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex "

of Gesture, New York, Weyhe, 1936 (81 pp. and 20 plates).
" Physical exercise, the type of the former, while it may
induce a certain kinesthetic enjoyment, does not, in its net
effect, go far beyond the muscles, the lungs, the circulatory
system, and so on. Play activity, on the other hand, has as
a result a restoration of what we may generally term a
rational balance [note : Andrae's ' polar balance of physical
and metaphysical ']. It is true that, in so far as play is
recreation, it is escape. It is an escape from the relative
chaos of ordinary experience to a world where there is a
rational and moral order, plainly visible, and not simply the
object of faith. The play is, then, like art, a clarification of
experience . . . almost identical with a sense of freedom.
The real hindrance to freedom is not rules but chance ; the
rules and the game make possible the freedom within its
framework." Seward, George, Journal of Philosophy (1944)
41:184. It is just this " clarification " that the anthropolo-
gist misses, when he merely " observes " with scientific
" objectivity " and " detachment, 1 ' hardly to be dis-
tinguished from condescension. "This, in fact, is the
Western way of hiding one's own heart under the cloak of
so-called scientific understanding. We do it partly because
of the miserable vanitd des savants which fears and rejects
with horror any sign of living sympathy, and partly
because an understanding that reaches the feelings might
allow contact with the foreign spirit to become a serious
experience/' Jung, C. G., and Wilhelm, Richard, Secret of
the Golden Flower, London, Kegan, Paul, 1932 (ix and 151
pp., 10 plates) ; in particular p. 77. I say that anthropology
is useless, or almost useless, if it does not lead to any
" serious " experience.

It hardly needs to be said that I am not accusing either of
the two authors cited of "vanity" or want of "living
sympathy." Professor Ashley Montagu, at any rate, has
said that " in spite of our enormous technological advances
we are spiritually, and as humane beings, not the equals of
the average Australian aboriginal or the average Eskimo
we are very definitely their inferiors." Montagu, M. F.
Ashley, " Socio-Biology of Man," Sri. Monthly (1940)

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50:483-490. It is to such writers as Sir J. G. Frazer and
L6vy-Bruhl that Jung's critique really applies.

Cf. J. Layard, Stone Men of Malekula, p. 701, on
" spurious scientific objectivity."

78 On this passive subjection compare Chdndogya
Upanisad VIII:i.5 and Philo Judaeus, Quis rerum divinarum
heres, 186. The distinction involved is that of will from
desire : " the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." To do
as one " likes " is the antithesis of free will ; the free man
much rather likes what he does than does what he likes.

79 Plutarch, Moralia, 393/.,and cf . references in footnote 30.

80 Jfiana Khanda X:43-62 ; reference footnote 65.

81 In other words, " letting their dead bury their dead/ 1
and " taking no thought for the morrow " ; living as nearly
as possible in the eternal now.

82 The method in their madness being that they still lived
naturally, placing no forcible restraints on their feelings and
so, as another translator adds, " dissipating their latent
tendencies." One may recall Blake's saying, " Desires
suppressed breed pestilence."

88 The persons mentioned include the princes, men,
women, young and old, actors, singers, fools, professors,
ministers, artisans and hetaerae.

84 Brhadaranyaka Upanisad IV:4.22.

88 It is expressly said that the Prince regarded gain and
loss, friend and foe, impartially : as in the Bhagavad Gitd
the principle is enunciated, " Thy concern is with the action
only, not with the result." One remembers, with Walt
Whitman, that " battles are lost in the same spirit in which
they are won " ; and that the soldier's vocation does not
require him to hate, but only to fight well. This last is
admirably illustrated by the well-known story of 'Ali who,
engaged in single combat, was on the point of victory, but
when his opponent spat in his face, withdrew, because he
would not fight in anger.

86 On the distinction of understanding from psychological
analysis, see Urban, Wilbur Marshall, The Intelligible
World, London, Allen and Unwin, and New York, Mac-
millan, 1929 (479 pp.), pp. 184, 185. Understanding

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" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex "

requires a recognition of common values. For so long as
men cannot think with other peoples they have not under-
stood, but only known them ; and in this situation it is
largely an ignorance of their own intellectual heritage that
stands in the way of understanding and makes an unfamiliar
way of thinking seem to be " queer." It lies peculiarly
within the province of anthropology to enable men to
understand one another.

121

VII: Gradation, Evolution and Reincarnation 1

THE so-called conflicts of religion and science are,
for the most part, the result of a mutual misunder-
standing of their respective terms and range. As to
range : one deals with the why of things, the other
with their how ; one with intangibles, the other with
things that can be measured, whether directly or in-
directly. The question of terms is important. At
first sight the notion of a creation completed " in the
beginning " seems to conflict with the observed
origin of species in temporal succession. But iv
apxfi, in principle, agre do not mean only "in the
beginning " with respect to a period of time, but also
11 in principle," that is, in an ultimate source logically
rather than temporally prior to all secondary causes,
and no more before than after the supposed beginning
of their operation. So, as Dante says, " Neither
before nor after was God's moving on the face of the
waters " 2 ; we must think of God as doing all things at
once . . . and Philo, " At that time, all things took
place simultaneously . . . but a sequence was neces-
sarily written into the narrative because of their sub-
sequent generation from one another " 3 ; and Boehme,
" It was an everlasting beginning." 4

As Aristotle says, " Eternal beings are not in time." 5
God's existence is, therefore, now the eternal now that
separates past from future durations but is not itself a
duration, however short. There, in Meister Eckhart's
words "... and there is au <md, then, of the notion
that the universe came into being in ' six days V
So ' ' God worketh now", 6 still working and remaining " 7 ;

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Gradation, Evolution, and Reincarnation

God is creating the world now, this instant ". 8 Again,
no sooner has some time elapsed, however little,
but everything is changed ; ir&vra, p, " you cannot
dip your feet twice in the same waters." 9 So, then, as
for Jalalu'd Din Rumi, "Every instant thou art
dying, and returning ; Muhammad hath said that this
world is but a moment. . . . Every moment the world
is renewed, life is ever arriving anew, like the stream.
. . . The beginning, which is thought, eventuates in
action ; know that in such wise was the construction
of the world in eternity." 10

In all this there is nothing to which the natural
scientist can object ; he may, indeed, reply that his
interest is confined to the operation of mediate causes,
and that it does not extend to questions of a first
cause or of the whatness of life ; but that is simply
a definition of his self-chosen field. The Ego is the
only content of the Self that can be known objectively,
and therefore the only one that he is willing to con-
sider. His concern is only with behaviour.

Empirical observation is always of things that
change, that is, of individual things or classes of
individual things ; of which, as all philosophers are
agreed, it cannot be said that they are, but only that
they become or evolve. The physiologist, for example,
investigates the body, and the psychologist the soul or
individuality. The latter is perfectly aware that the
continued being of individualities is only a postulate,
convenient and even necessary for practical purposes,
but intellectually untenable ; and in this respect he is
in complete agreement with the Buddhist, who is never
tired of insisting that body and soul composite and
changeable, and therefore wholly mortal " are not
my Self," not the Reality that must be known if we are

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to "become what we are.' 1 In the same way St.
Augustine 11 points out that those who saw that both of
these, body and soul, are mutable, have sought for what
is immutable, and so found God that One, of which
or whom the Upanishads declare that " that art thou."
Theology, accordingly, coinciding with autology, pres-
cinds from all that is emotional, to consider only that
which does not move " Change and decay in all around
I see, O Thou who changest not." It finds him in that
eternal now that always separates the past from the
future and without which these paired terms would
have no meaning whatever, just as space would have
no meaning were it not for the point that distinguishes
here from there. Moment without duration, point
without extension these are the Golden Mean, and
inconceivably Strait Way leading out of time into
eternity, from death to immortality. 12 .

Our experience of " life " is evolutionary : what
evolves ? Evolution is reincarnation, the death of one
and the rebirth of another in momentary continuity :
who reincarnates ? Metaphysics prescinds from the
animistic proposition of Descartes, Cogito ergo sum, to
say, Cogito ergo EST ; and to the question, Quid
est ? answers that this is an improper question, because
its subject is not a what amongst others but the
whatness of them all and of all that they are not.
Reincarnation as currently understood to mean the
return of individual souls to other bodies here on earth
is not an orthodox Indian doctrine, but only a popular
belief. So, for example, as Dr. B. C. Law remarks,
" It goes without saying that the Buddhist thinker
repudiates the notion of the passing of an ego from one
embodiment to another. 1 ' 18 We take our stand with
Sri Sankaracarya when he says, " In truth, there is no

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other transmigrant but the Lord " 14 he who is both
transcendently himself and the immanent Self in all
beings, but never himself becomes anyone ; for which
there could be cited abundant authority from the Vedas
and Upanishads. If, then, we find Sri Krishna
saying to Arjuna, and the Buddha to his Mendicants,
" Long is the road that we have trodden, and many are
the births that you and I have known," the reference
is not to a plurality of essences, but to the Common
Man in everyman, who in most men has forgotten
himself, but in the reawakened has reached the end of
the road, and having done with all becoming, is no
longer a personality in time, no longer anyone, no
longer one of whom one can speak by a proper
name.

The Lord is the only transmigrant. That art thou
the very Man in everyman. So, as Blake says :

" Man looks out in tree, herb, fish, beast, collect-
ing up the scattered portions of his immortal
body . . .

Wherever a grass grows or a leaf buds, the Eternal
Man is seen, is heard, is felt,
And all his sorrows, till he reassumes his ancient
bliss " 15 ;

Manikka Vaagar:

" Grass, shrub was I, worm, tree, full many a sort
of beast, bird, snake, stone, man and demon . . .

In every species born, Great Lord ! this day I've
gained release " lfl ;

Apollonius of Tyana :

" The passion of phenomenal beings is not that of
each but rather that of ONE in ever-each ; and this
ONE cannot be rightly spoken of except we name it
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the * First Essence '. For this alone is both the
agent and the patient, making Itself all things unto
all and throughout all God Eternal, the idio-
syncracy of Whose Essence is wronged when it is
detracted from by names and masks " 17 .

Ovid:

" The spirit wanders, comes now here, now there,
and occupies whatever frame it pleases. From
beasts it passes into human bodies, and from our
bodies into beasts, but never perishes/' 18

Taliesin :

" I was in many a guise before I was disenchanted,
I was the hero in trouble, I am old and I am
young " 19 ;

Empedocles :

" Before now I was born a youth and a maiden, a
bush and a bird, and a dumb fish leaping out of the
sea" 20 ;

Jalalu'd Dm Rumi :

" First came he from the realm of the inorganic,
long years dwelt he in the vegetable state, passed
into the animal condition, thence towards humanity :
whence, again, there is another migration to be
made" 21 ;

Aitareya Arayyaka :

" He who knows the Self more and more clearly is
more and more fully manifested. In whatever
plants and trees and animals there are, he knows the
Self more and more fully manifested. For in plants
and trees only the plasm is seen, but in animals
intelligence. In them the Self becomes more and
more evident. In man the Self is yet more and

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more evident ; for he is most endowed with provi-
dence, he says what he has known, he sees what he
has known, he knows the morrow, he knows what is
and is not mundane, and by the mortal seeks the
immortal. But as for the others, animals, hunger
and thirst are the degree of their discrimination " 22 .

In sum, in the words of Faridu'd Din 'Attar :

" Pilgrim, Pilgrimage, and Road was but Myself
toward Myself/' 28

This is the traditional doctrine, not of " reincarna-
tion " in the popular and animistic sense, but of the
transmigration and evolution of " the ever-productive
Nature " ; it is one that in no way conflicts with or
excludes the actuality of the process of evolution as
envisaged by the modern naturalist. On the contrary,
it is precisely the conclusion to which, for example,
Erwin Schrodinger is led by his enquiry into the facts
of heredity in his book entitled What is Life ? In his
concluding chapter on "Determinism and Freewill,"
his " only possible inference " is that " I in the widest
meaning of the word that is to say every conscious
mind that has ever said or felt ' I ' am the person, if
any, who controls ' the motion of the atoms ' according
to the Laws of Nature. . . . Consciousness is a singular
of which the plural is unknown."

Schr6dinger is perfectly aware that this is the
position enunciated in the Upanishads, and most
succinctly in the formulas, " That art thou . . . other
than Whom there is no other seer, hearer, thinker or
agent."

I cite him here not because I hold that the truth of
traditional doctrines can be proved by laboratory
methods, but because his position so well illustrates

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the main point I am making, namely that there are no
necessary conflicts of science with religion, but only
the possibility of a confusion of their respective fields ;
and the fact that for the whole man, in whom the
integration of the Ego with the Self has been effected,
there is no impassable barrier between the fields of
science and religion. Natural scientist and meta-
physician one and the same man can be both ; there
need be no betrayal of either scientific objectivity on
the one hand or of principles on the other. 24

REFERENCES

1 Reprinted from Main Currents in Modern Thought,
summer 1946, and Blackfriars, November 1946. In
Blackfriars the following introduction by Bernard Kelly
preceded the article :

The following essay by Dr. Coomaraswamy is offered to
Blackfriars readers for the very high degree of interest
which attaches to the approach from an unfamiliar stand-
point to the familiar problem of the relation of science to
religion.

The metaphysical focus of the essay may perhaps be best
obtained from the brilliant paragraph on the Cogito of
Descartes. Here the startling character of the thought is
due to the contrast of the respective ways in which the
imagination of East and West lends support to the concept
of being. If the West, especially in that caricature of itself
which is called modern philosophy, has tended to imagine
reality in terms of visible solids, thus colouring the concept
of being with an externality and a rigidity of outline not
wholly its own, the imagination of the East has generally
been more suggestive of a conception of being as an act,
personal or impersonal as the point of view changes.

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Gradation, Evolution, and Reincarnation

For St. Thomas also, being is an " act " to which,
ultimately, even substance among the categories is
potential, and, to that extent, relative. From no other
position available to the West can fruitful contact be made
with the tradition Dr. Coomaraswamy represents.

From a deepened understanding of the principles of St.
Thomas's metaphysics, it may be possible, now that
Eastern writers are more readily available to explain their
own thought to us, to carry the understanding of Eastern
tradition further than the position outlined in the De
Unitate Intellectus contra Averrhoistas. In any case it is
certain that the unity, or rather the non-duality, of
consciousness of which Dr. Coomaraswamy speaks, has
nothing to do with the evolutionary and sentimental con-
ceptions of theological modernism.

BERNARD KELLY.

2 Paradiso 29.20-21.

3 Opif. 13 and 67 LA 1.20.

4 Mysterium Pansophicum 4.9.
6 John 5.17.

6 St. Augustine, Conf. 7.15.

7 Physics 4.12 (221 B).

8 Meister Eckhart, Pfeiffer p. 207 = Evans 1.164.

9 Heracleitus fr. 41.

10 Mathnawi 1.1142 f. 2.97.

11 Sermo 241.3.3, cf. De musica 6.5.9.10.

12 See my " Symplegades " in Studies . . . offered in
Homage to George Sarton on his sixtieth Birthday, New York,
and Time and Eternity, Ascona 1947.

18 Concepts of Buddhism, 1937, p. 45. Cf. T. W. Rhys
Davids in SBE 3.43 and 26.142, E. W. Hopkins in JRAS
1906, p. 581, and J. Takakusu in Philosophy East and West,
ed. C. A. Moore, New York, 1944, pp. 78-81. Also my On
the One and Only Transmigrant, JAOS Suppl. 3, 1944.

14 Brahma Sutra Bhasya 1.1.5.

16 The Four Zoas, Night 8.

16 G. U. Pope, TiruvZfagam, Oxford, 1900, p. 3.

"Epistle to Valerius (Ep. 58 in the Loeb Library
Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana.

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18 Metamorphoses 15.165-168. This and the preceding
items are Pythagorean.

19 J. G. Evans, Poems from the Book of Taliesin, 1915 ;
R. D. Scott, The Thumb of Knowledge, 1930, 124 ft. Cf.
Amergin in The Oxford Book of Mystical Verse, p. I.

20 Fr. 117 D in Diogenes Laertius 8.77.

81 Mathnawi 4.3637 f., cf. 3.3901-3907, and 6.126-128.

22 Aitareya Aranyaka 2.3.2. Cf. St. Augustine, De musica
6.5.9.10 in H. M. Carr Realists and Nominalists t Oxford,
1946, pp. 13, 14.

28 Mantiqu't-Tair, version by Fitzgerald.

24 The short essay above summarizes a position outlined
in my " On the One and Only Transmigrant " (AOS Suppl.
3, 1944) and to be more fully developed with adequate
documentation in a work on reincarnation to be completed
shortly. The position assumed is that all the traditional
texts, Indian, Islamic, and Greek, that seem to assert a
reincarnation of individual essences are expressions in
terms of a popular, pragmatic animism " animistic " in
the sense that they assume the reality of the postulated Ego
and should be understood metaphysically as having
reference only to the universality of the immanent Spirit,
Daimon, or Eternal Man-in-this-man, who realizes his own
ex tempore omnipresence when he " reassumes his ancient
bliss."

130